That legacy — and his influence on the lives of people around the world — is inestimable, and we will be talking about him and his amazing, interesting life a great deal in the coming days and weeks.

But as the sun comes up here in New York this morning, still mourning the departed, we are forced to confront more immediate and material concerns. Insensitive though it may seem to consider at this moment, Apple is not simply a great company — it has also proven over the last decade to be a great investment, and as such is one of the most widely held stocks in the world. Its largest shareholders are the big mutual fund companies like Fidelity, the Vanguard Group, State Street Corp. and T. Rowe Price, who among them own more than 15 percent of Apple’s shares.

And as Apple’s value, as measured by market capitalization, has ballooned from less than $10 billion a decade ago to north of $350 billion as of yesterday, the anxiety about the mortality of its founder has regularly caused its value to swoon. Over the seven-year course of Jobs’s illness, Apple shareholders have had to come to terms with the so-called “Jobs premium,” the extra value attached to the company’s shares that existed as long as he was directly involved in mapping company strategy and applying his unique touch to its products.

The conventional wisdom among Apple analysts now is that Apple investors, once known for their hair-trigger reflex to sell on any whiff of rumor, have gained a more complex and reasonable understanding of the situation. Apple, without Jobs, will still be Apple, and for the immediate and medium-term future, there is no reason to believe that its strategy and execution will falter in his absence.

But as I wrote in August, when Jobs resigned his position as CEO, it’s important to understand that Apple’s long-term vision has been deposited deeply within the DNA of the company. There is a script for the next several years. Products are mapped out, schedules are set, components have been purchased, manufacturing deals have been inked. In short, everyone at Apple knows what their job is and will continue to do it without missing a beat. The path ahead is no less clear today than it was yesterday.

No doubt the shares will be volatile as the markets open today. But that volatility will be much less than might have been expected years ago. It wasn’t so long ago that analysts predicted that, upon the death or departure of Steve Jobs, the company would lose as much as a third of its value. That’s no longer likely.

Today, investors seem to understand intuitively that the fundamental reasons to invest in Apple remain unchanged. The growth trajectory and profitability in the sales of its products remain the envy of the industry. There are predictions that Apple will sell more than 100 million iPhones next year, and nearly 30 million iPads in the second half of this year. Mac sales continue to set records quarter after quarter.

For all its strength in North America and Europe, Apple still has significant room to grow overseas. There are already signs of progress. In its most recent quarter, Apple reported revenue in the Asia-Pacific region of $6.3 billion, amounting to 22 percent of sales, and more than triple the sales seen in that region a year ago. One key market — China — remains a strategic priority for CEO Tim Cook and his team. Apple is still something new to the people of China, and introducing them to the brand on an ever-widening scale will be an interesting journey.

If history is any judge, it will be a fruitful introduction. Wherever it goes, Apple’s brand seems to succeed. Ask anyone familiar with it — it is easily one of the best-loved and most recognized brands. And yet when branding experts measure its brand equity, it ranks high but surprisingly also shows room to improve.

Just this week, Interbrand, a consultancy that focuses on corporate brands, released its annual survey of the world’s Top 100 brands. Apple is ranked No. 8, one notch above the Walt Disney Company (of which, ironically, Jobs was the largest shareholder), and two notches above Hewlett-Packard; the company had seen the largest year-over-year improvement in the value of its brand. It’s informative to consider some other names that appeared in the Top 10: Stalwart consumer brands like Coca-Cola (No. 1), General Electric (No. 5) and McDonald’s (No. 6).

Yet it’s also interesting to note that among the technology names that appeared in the Top 10 of the Interbrand survey, Apple wasn’t at the top: That distinction goes to IBM (No. 2), Microsoft (No. 3), Google (No. 4) and Intel (No. 7). Rather than a weakness, I think this fact speaks to Apple’s potential.

The story of Apple has never been one of narrow horizons. It has always been about looking ahead. Not just to the next quarter or to the next year, but of seeing how the march of technological progress can be harnessed to make life better in ways we can hardly grasp now. And yet when things like the iPhone materialize, they become part of us and quickly embed themselves into the very fabric of day-to-day existence. They’re not tools so much as extensions of our minds and identities. And that vision, so carefully articulated by Steve Jobs yet revealed only one product at a time, is still incomplete.

And so I find myself writing something that at once seems absurd and yet completely obvious: It may very well be, on this deeply sad day following the death of its founder, that Apple’s best days are still ahead.

Image via Jonathan Mak’s Tumblr.

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Steve Jobs Full Coverage »

Episodes like this put the onus on companies to be social, and some do it better than others. Today the Dachis Group, an outfit that helps companies get a handle on all things social media, launched its Social Business Index which ranks, in real time, the most socially-active companies. Dachis had previously offered the data only to companies in the index, but now it’s open for all the world to peruse and use as a research tool.

You can probably guess the most social company on the list: Facebook. It’s followed fairly closely by Google. But the rest of the top five as of this writing are a bit of a surprise. News Corp. (owner of this Web site); Coinstar, the outfit that puts those coin-collector machines in supermarkets; and Wal-Mart.

Where does the data come from? Dachis runs what it calls a Social Business Intelligence as a Service platform that tracks hundreds of millions of “signals” ranging from tweets and Facebook posts to posts on customer forums around tens of thousands of brands. It then crunches the numbers as to their meaning and turns it all into usable data. The point is to give companies useful information so they can track marketing efforts to see if they’re paying off, analyze sentiments about different brands, and so on. It can also help determine whether or not spending on one campaign paid off so that ineffective approaches can be avoided.

There’s no question that Dachis is winning business from big players. Its list of customers is a who’s who of household names: Coca-Cola, Samsung, Intel, HBO, AT&T, Citibank and Disney, to name a few. Now there’s a fascinating new data tool to evaluate on an almost minute-by-minute basis which companies are the most social, and it allows you to drill down by industry, company size and lots of other factors. Since it caught my eye as being surprising, there’s a quick glance of Coinstar’s screen below.

Story image is a collection of social media icons I found at Rankraiser.com

Text messaging applications, which offer the ability to send messages to a group of people via a single phone number, were in the spotlight at SXSW. Companies such as Gogii, KIK, Beluga, GroupMe and Fast Society were the talk of the town since they provided easy ways for large groups of people to socialize and get in touch quickly.

Following the event, GroupMe provided its first hint at what its business model would be when it opened up its mobile group chat to brands, which would be highlighted in a “Featured Groups” section.

Now, Gogii is beefing up its monetizing efforts.

Hill, who will have the title of VP of monetization and publishing, was most recently VP of mobile monetization at Myspace.

She will oversee all company revenue, which includes in-app purchases, advertising and a new publishing unit, said Gogii CEO Scott Lahman. “I can’t think of anyone better who can hit the ground running. She’s been doing this for years at Fox and at Myspace. This is almost the exact same role.”

Gogii’s textPlus application has 7.7 million monthly active users and recently set a record for sending 35 million messages in one day.

While Hill is just joining the Los Angeles-based startup, the company has been monetizing with advertising from the beginning.  ”We hit seven-figure revenue-quarters last year, and that’s continued to grow. We are well past the testing stage. Advertising campaigns were up 300 percent in the first quarter compared to the same period last year.”

Mostly, the app relies on splash ads–which are like a homepage takeover–which the user sees immediately after opening the application. Lahman said users on average open the application 10 to 15 times a day, and that the ads have a click-through rate in the high single digits. There are also banner ads from within the applications, which are seen by its nearly eight million monthly active users.

Lahman said they made the decision to monetize with advertising because it allowed them to grow the business much faster than if they charged for it. A paid version of the application, which has no advertising, allows the user to pick the area code for the phone number they use. He said six to 10 percent of its users choose to upgrade. The app costs $4.99 and is available on iPhone and Android.

“The advertisers love it. We are the text client for a lot of our customers–that’s why they use it so much to send so many messages.”

Gogii uses a mix of its own direct sales force in addition to farming out some inventory to mobile ad networks, like Google’s AdMob, Jumptap and Greystripe. Returning advertisers include Disney, Fox, Target, Ford, Paramount, CBS, Unilever, JCPenney, MTV, Coca-Cola and Zynga.

The new publishing business, which Hill will oversee, will experiment with a sort of white-label service, which will allow a brand to completely take over the application for a specific brand or event.

Lahman said in March, 25 percent of the company’s revenues were coming from paid features inside the application. It’s his goal to hit 50 percent by the end of the year. “That will come against a growing advertising business–that’s not cannibalizing it,” he said.

At least one researcher thinks so. Arthur O’Connor, a doctoral student at Pace University in New York, is testing whether social-media popularity–as measured by Facebook “likes,” Twitter followers and YouTube views–is correlated with stock prices.

In a pilot study, Mr. O’Connor found a “statistically significant” correlation, although he tested only three brands–Starbucks Corp., Nike Inc. and Coca-Cola Co.–over a 10-month period. The more social-media fans a brand had, the better its stock was likely to do, even accounting for general market conditions.

The finding held true even though the three companies studied had very different returns. During the test, Starbucks stock increased 29 percent, Nike grew 14 percent and Coke fell by nearly 6 percent.

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Steele is a longtime marketing exec with previous stints at the video ad start-up Tremor Media and Coca-Cola. She comes to Twitter at a time when the company is finally focusing on turning its service into a business. Twitter is expected to have about $100 million in revenue in 2011. It was valued at $3.7 billion in its most recent funding round, and well above that in off-and-on acquisition talks with Facebook and Google.

Steele’s Twitter account is here. Appropriately, we first learned of the news on Twitter, from Advertising Age editor Michael Learmonth. A spokesperson for Twitter confirmed the hire this afternoon.

But guess what subject was the most tweeted? (Hint: it wasn’t Super Bowl MVP Aaron Rodgers. Heck, it wasn’t even the controversial Groupon ads.) It was Usher’s appearance during the halftime show featuring the Black Eyed Peas. And, according to the Twitter post, “the continued talk about him made him the most talked about person during the Super Bowl… Aaron Rodgers, the most mentioned player, was sixth.”

On the commercial side of things, Doritos got the most Twitter love, followed by Audi, Pepsi, Chevy, Coca-Cola and Groupon.

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Its 2010 lobbying spend was about $1.6 million. (Microsoft’s was $6.9 million.) But while it might seem that any lobbying Apple might need to do in Washington could be easily accomplished by a phone call from one of its directors–one in particular–evidently that’s not the case. Because the company has hired a new lobbying firm to help deal with its D.C. concerns: Fierce, Isakowitz and Blalock.

It’s not clear why Apple hired the firm; lobbying disclosures say only that it will handle “innovation” issues for the company, and sources I’ve spoken with seem unaware of any big legislative pushes the company might be mulling. That said, Fierce, Isakowitz and Blalock is a formidable lobbying firm with a number of executives who did stints in the Bush administration and the Republican National Committee, and a client list that includes some very big names: Coca-Cola, CTIA, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, Ford, Time Warner and Oracle.

Think Larry Ellison got a referral fee?

The photo + caption combination seems to work particularly well on Tumblr (and Lolcats) but you can get a pretty good sense of what’s going on via a few samples below. But for my money the best stuff is also the stuff that makes good use of the f-bomb, so you’ll want to see those on the site itself.

What’s great about TRPDSAA, IMHO, is that while a lot of this stuff is inside baseball, you should still be able to appreciate it without knowing what, say, “call to action” is supposed to mean. It’s clearly the product of someone who loves advertising and hates it, too.

And that person works in advertising, of course. Here’s a brief email interview I conducted with 27-year-old E.B. Davis III, a copywriter at Washington, D.C.-based GMMB:

Peter Kafka: Looks like you just started the Tumblr now. Why?

E. B. Davis III: For fun. To take the piss out. Advertising can be a lot of fun, but we get caught up in minutiae and nitpicking and buzzwords. We tend to forget we’re talking to people who don’t really want to talk to us.

Kafka: What provoked it, and what are you trying to do?

Davis: I made some pictures, put them on a blog, and showed two or three people, hoping they would laugh. I expected that to be the end of it. Tumblr only allowed 15 posts on the front page, so I only made 13 pictures, because I didn’t expect people to want to even bother going to a second page. Quick, easy, in and out. Now there are 29 posts (the rest from other people), with 300 submissions I need to find the time to post.

Kafka: Given that you’re satirizing advertising but work in advertising, should we assume you want to be doing something else?

Davis: I am satirizing advertising, and I work in advertising, but I don’t think we should assume I want to be doing something else. Advertising got great potential to be an idea factory. I think we’ve got the potential to make short movies, full-length movies, music videos, and a lot of cool other shit. I work at a social-good marketing agency, and I think advertising has taken a huge step forward over the past couple of years in connecting buying things to doing good. Easy charity. I was already going to buy that Coca-Cola anyway, and now it’s helping to help someone else. Awesome. We get free radio and free television because of advertising. It’s not the worst industry in the world. I have great hope for what advertising can do. It’s just, you know, we mostly end up making a print ad.

At the same time, I’m learning that I don’t need advertising to do what I want. I can make stuff without them. Hence this blog, among other things.

Kafka: How much of the site is you, and how much of it comes from contributors? And do contributors send in art and text, or just text? How much traffic are you getting now?

Davis: [I made] 13 original posts, and now people are making the content (mostly unasked). I’m assuming they’re mostly advertising folk, and I worry that the thing’s too insider-y for anyone else to really care about it. Not that they should care about it. It is a Stupid Thing. My favorite contributors do the work of putting their words on a picture for me, but some just send headlines and I have to put them together.

I have no idea how much traffic I’m getting. I’ve got about 3,000 followers and a lot of tweets and shit.

Kafka: What happens now?

Davis: I have no plans for what’s next. Keep making posts until people run out of interest. I don’t think these types of sites really lead to anything. They’re fun for a minute and then you move on. I don’t want to make any more of it than that. I’m ready to start working on new ideas, but I don’t plan to use the blog to promote it. I don’t want this to become a ‘self-promotion’ thing. I didn’t really have my name attached to it in the beginning, but some people found out it was me, so my name’s out there, but it wasn’t my intention.

It’s just for fun.

It’s not all departures!

Yahoo is hiring former News Corp. and Disney online exec Mickie Rosen (pictured here) to run its Audience unit, which includes the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s powerful content sites, sources said.

Starting next week, Rosen will report to Americas head Ross Levinsohn, who has worked with her before, at both News Corp. and Fuse Capital.

Her new title is SVP of the Yahoo Media Network, which is apparently a rebranding of Audience.

Previous to this job, Rosen was CEO of Tecca, a price-checking service Fuse created in partnership with Best Buy.

It’s likely she will remain based in the Los Angeles area, where Yahoo has a large office in Santa Monica, Calif.

The move is Levinsohn’s first management rejiggering since he took over last year, and there is likely to be more to come.

Rosen, who has also worked at the Fandango online movie ticketing site, will replace interim audience head Raymond Stern, who will be–as before–running partnerships and business development, as well as Yahoo’s listings business.

Rosen’s new job had actually been that of former Audience head David Ko, as well as former Media VP Jimmy Pitaro.

Ko left Yahoo and is now heading mobile games at Zynga, while Pitaro is a top digital exec at Disney.

More to come from Levinsohn, but here is Rosen’s bio from the Fuse Web site:

Mickie has over 20 years of operating, strategy and investing experience. For the past dozen years, she has been at the intersection of media and technology, in both large companies such as News Corporation and The Walt Disney Company and in small, early stage start-ups.

Prior to joining the firm, she was the head of entertainment for Fox Interactive Media where she was responsible for properties such as AmericanIdol.com, Rotten Tomatoes and the entertainment channels of MySpace. Mickie also led content acquisition across the Company, and was a lead in envisioning, structuring and negotiating Hulu, the premier video joint venture between News Corp. and NBC Universal.

Prior to Fox Interactive Media, Mickie was the head of product development, marketing and public relations for Fandango, where she helped lead the company from an early-stage start-up to profitability as it became a leader in its space (acquired by Comcast). Mickie was also a senior executive with an e-learning start-up, an Idealab! consumer robotics company and Disney’s Corporate Alliances group, where she negotiated deals and managed Disney’s top global partners such as Coca-Cola, American Express and AT&T.

Mickie built the foundation of her career with McKinsey & Company, where she spent seven years consulting with senior management on strategy, operational and organizational issues across a number of industries, including media and technology.
Mickie has an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a B.A. in Economics from UC San Diego, and is based in Los Angeles.

The popularity of Twitter has fueled expectations that marketers could use the service to target relevant ads to consumers interested in real-time information about breaking events and other topics. Since launching its much-anticipated advertising products in April, Twitter has signed on more than 30 big-name brands, including Coca-Cola Co. (KO), Virgin America and Starbucks Corp. (SBUX), to test them.

Some marketers say that early results are promising but that advertising on Twitter remains an experiment. Other marketers, including PepsiCo Inc.’s (PEP) beverage brands and Best Buy Co. (BBY), who tested out Twitter’s new advertising products—some without cost—haven’t made new ad buys. Marketers say they definitely aren’t ruling out advertising on Twitter in the future, but that it’s still early days and they are figuring out what works.

“The jury is out” on whether Twitter can become a home for brand advertisers, said David Cohen, an executive vice president at Universal McCann, a media-buying agency owned by Interpublic Group of Cos.

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Totally awesome! That’s the paraphrased verdict from Coca-Cola (KO), which tried out the ads this week and generated 86 million impressions in 24 hours.

The actual quote from global interactive marketing boss Carol Kruse, via the Financial Times, is less exciting (because marketing people speak in a weird dialect that sounds nothing like everyday English): “The amount of impressions in such a short period of time around our whole World Cup campaign, to me it was a phenomenal time. It made this emotional connection at the time, it was great.”

The FT notes that Coke got a lot of bang for its buck by running the ads on Wednesday, when Twitter was overwhelmed by users tweeting about both the U.S.-Algeria and England-Slovenia World Cup games. Weirdly, the FT doesn’t note that Twitter struggled to stay up on Wednesday, due to said overwhelming use.

So maybe it was a push. In any case, it’s impossible to really evaluate this stuff unless you know how much Coke paid. And we don’t:

Coke’s Twitter messages congratulated the England and US teams, linked to videos on YouTube and invited people to “share their celebration” of their teams’ success.

Although Ms Kruse did not reveal how much Coke had spent on the campaign, she indicated that the test had not been expensive compared with other forms of online advertising.

“When it’s something new, it’s hard for publishers to know what the value is,” she said. “We didn’t know how it would work out but we wanted to learn in that space….It could have completely flopped. They [Twitter] also wanted to learn with us.”

Note to young people: I have a vague memory of this ad running in the 1980s. As I recall, it was in no way supposed to be a joke:

Among brands that are advertising around the World Cup, Nike (NKE) is running away (horrible pun intended) with the online attention, according to several Internet and social-media trackers. A Nielsen study released Friday found that Nike had about 30 percent of the World Cup “buzz” among brands on blogs, message boards and social-networking sites–a coup for a company that isn’t a partner or official sponsor of the World Cup or of FIFA, soccer’s governing body.

FIFA has been trying to limit the visibility of companies that haven’t paid the hefty price for official sponsorships, the Journal reported this week. But although the organization can restrict advertising around venues, there’s little it can do online. Poor FIFA partner Adidas had about 14 percent of the online mentions, followed by Coca-Cola (KO) and Sony (SNE) at about 12 percent each.

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You were expecting an A+, right?

Because of all the cursing and tough talk and uber-sassy assistant and loyal sidekick, Judy.

And especially, the use of elaborate barnyard metaphors from Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz’s growing up in Wisconsin to describe the Internet giant’s current state of affairs.

That includes the priceless bon mots from an earnings call last year: “This is not a company that needs to be pulled apart and left for the chickens.”

Not unless Farmer Bartz says it needs to be, that is!

I began handing out marks to Bartz recently, after she gave herself a B- for overall performance for the year since she took over the troubled Internet giant.

But I decided to be more specific, splitting the grades for Yahoo in 2009 into five categories.

I awarded Bartz an A- for management, a C+ for financials, a C- for product innovation and an incomplete for deal-making so far.

And, indeed all signs should point to A+ on the fifth, moxie, especially when you are talking about Bartz, one of the more colorful of Internet CEOs on the scene these days.

While AOL (AOL) CEO Tim Armstrong has those Don Draper cheekbones, Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer that whole sweaty energy thing, Amazon (AMZN) Jeff Bezos the borderline maniacal vibe and Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt the big-brained alien act, Bartz is still 110 percent more entertaining on any given day.

But if you really think about it, she has been much more systematic in her tenure, making no dramatic, swing-for-the-fences moves, despite displaying a great deal of style.

More Taylor Swift than Lady Gaga, if you get my drift.

Like the deeply calculated Swift, Carol Bartz is a careful fixer–cutting costs at the Silicon Valley icon, finally making the inevitable search and online advertising deal with Microsoft, doing a lot of obvious internal rejiggering of systems, prettying up the front page and starting a much needed marketing campaign.

And while this all meets one definition of moxie–energy and pep–it’s still not that kind of fizzy riskiness (no wacky outfits for Yahoo!) that perhaps is still coming.

According to various definitions, the word’s etymology is from Moxie, a soft drink from the early 20th century that was one of the first mass-produced carbonated beverages in the U.S.

Per Wikipedia, its origins are as “a panacea, it was supposed to be especially effective against ‘paralysis, softening of the brain, nervousness and insomnia.’”

Would that Yahoo could be that to consumers!

Sadly for Moxie, while it still survives in New England, it got knocked out of the soda race by Coca Cola (KO), much as the ubiquitous Google knocked Yahoo out of the search business.

But Bartz, who just completed an executive offsite at Half Moon Bay, Calif., might be ready to trot out her act more dramatically in the months to come and, therefore, up the moxie stakes.

At the end of Yahoo’s recent conference call for its fourth-quarter earnings, she noted firmly that, “We’re done looking inward.”

Indeed, sources tell me Bartz has decided to start bringing all kinds of outside thoughts and influences into Yahoo next to try to shake up the often self-absorbed culture.

Maybe Gaga?

Rah rah ah-ah-ah! Ro mah ro-mah-mah! Gaga Ooh-la-la!

Now that would show some real moxie.

Until that happens, here is video of the bizarre singer at the Grammy Awards a few days ago, as well as the dreadfully off-pitch Swift (what is up with that?):

Enter the Facial Profiler. The Profiler is a new Facebook application that lets members upload photos of themselves and match them with a similar-looking Facial Profiler user. The idea is that you can find your mirror image, just the way Coke has found its reflection in Coke Zero.

The app, which launches today, has been soliciting submissions to build a database with enough photos to reach critical mass. Once a photo is uploaded, its features are analyzed and rated. Users can then vote on the results, which the developers hope will improve its ratings over time. The software is based on the same kind of technology used by law-enforcement agencies to locate individuals within large pools of people.

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One way to think about this is as a timeline–or a stream. As people share more, the timeline gets filled in more and more with what is happening with everything you’re connected to. The pace of updates accelerates. This creates a continuous stream of information that delivers a deeper understanding for everyone participating in it. As this happens, people will no longer come to Facebook to consume a particular piece or type of content, but to consume and participate in the stream itself.”

A heavyhanded explanation for a simplistic concept, but perhaps there is a deeper meaning to be found in our collective tweet of consciousness mutterings–“John is stuck at SFO,” “Beth is all liquored up,” “Adam is reminiscing about his days on the Newton”…“Mark has a laughably grandiose vision of his social-networking service.”

Or perhaps the deeper meaning here is to be found in another tweak Facebook is making to its service. As part of this redesign, the company is making profiles and pages the same thing. What that means is that pages created by public figures, organizations and companies will now look, feel and behave just like any other profile. Now their proprietors, too, can join “the stream.” “These folks will now be able to share status updates, videos, photos or anything else they want, in the same way your friends can already,” says Zuckerberg. “You’ll be able to keep up with all of their activity in your News Feed. This means that you can find out that Oprah is reading a book backstage before a show, CNN posted a breaking story or U2 is working on a new song, just as you would see that your friend uploaded new photos from her trip to Europe.”

Presumably, that also means folks like Microsoft (MSFT), BlockBuster (BBI) and Coca-Cola (KO) can also tip you off to the fascinating things they’re up to. So in the end, this redesign isn’t about the continuing evolution of the “social graph” or whatever the hell Facebook calls its network these days. It’s about developing a new advertising program that allows businesses legitimate access to the 175 million Facebook members the company has so far failed miserably to monetize.

One way to think about this is as a timeline–or a stream. As people share more, the timeline gets filled in more and more with what is happening with everything you’re connected to. The pace of updates accelerates. This creates a continuous stream of information that delivers a deeper understanding for everyone participating in it. As this happens, people will no longer come to Facebook to consume a particular piece or type of content, but to consume and participate in the stream itself.”

A heavyhanded explanation for a simplistic concept, but perhaps there is a deeper meaning to be found in our collective tweet of consciousness mutterings–“John is stuck at SFO,” “Beth is all liquored up,” “Adam is reminiscing about his days on the Newton”…“Mark has a laughably grandiose vision of his social-networking service.”

Or perhaps the deeper meaning here is to be found in another tweak Facebook is making to its service. As part of this redesign, the company is making profiles and pages the same thing. What that means is that pages created by public figures, organizations and companies will now look, feel and behave just like any other profile. Now their proprietors, too, can join “the stream.” “These folks will now be able to share status updates, videos, photos or anything else they want, in the same way your friends can already,” says Zuckerberg. “You’ll be able to keep up with all of their activity in your News Feed. This means that you can find out that Oprah is reading a book backstage before a show, CNN posted a breaking story or U2 is working on a new song, just as you would see that your friend uploaded new photos from her trip to Europe.”

Presumably, that also means folks like Microsoft (MSFT), BlockBuster (BBI) and Coca-Cola (KO) can also tip you off to the fascinating things they’re up to. So in the end, this redesign isn’t about the continuing evolution of the “social graph” or whatever the hell Facebook calls its network these days. It’s about developing a new advertising program that allows businesses legitimate access to the 175 million Facebook members the company has so far failed miserably to monetize.

Really, an album that someone worked on for two years–is that worth only $9, $10, when people pay two bucks for coffee in Starbucks? People never really understand what’s happening to the artists. All the sharing of the music, right? Is it correct that people share their music, fill up these devices with music they haven’t paid for? If you had Coca-Cola coming through the faucet in your kitchen, how much would you be willing to pay for Coca-Cola? There you go. That’s what happened to the record business.”

–UMG CEO Doug Morris, Wired, Nov. 27

Offering its entire catalog of digitized video and music for free to the 19 million users of an upstart social-networking site was once about the furthest thing from Universal Music Group’s mind. Now, with the Internet rejiggering the music industry’s economic structure, it’s at the very top of it.

And so this morning, UMG said it would allow members of social network Imeem to stream its music for no charge, in exchange for a cut of the revenue from advertising aired while songs are playing. “Imeem has developed an innovative way to make our artists’ music a central part of the social-networking experience,” UMG CEO Doug Morris said in a statement. “They’ve done so the right way–by working with UMG to provide an exciting musical experience for consumers, while ensuring that our artists are fairly compensated.”

And ensuring that UMG is fairly compensated as well. As part of the deal, the company will get an equity stake in Imeem and is rumored to have received an upfront payment of more than $20 million.

UMG is the last of the ‘big four’ major labels to ink such a deal with Imeem, following in the footsteps of Warner Music Group, Sony BMG and EMI. All four majors–quite an achievement for a company that this past summer didn’t have a deal with any of them. Seems the music industry isn’t quite as wary of advertising-supported business models as it once was. “2008 is going to be the year of music labels trying to put themselves in front of everyone, no matter what business model it takes,” Forrester analyst James McQuivey told CNNMoney. “The labels have realized that you have to be everywhere on the Web, because the customer is everywhere. You need to put yourself in front of them when they make their entertainment decisions.”

Really, an album that someone worked on for two years–is that worth only $9, $10, when people pay two bucks for coffee in Starbucks? People never really understand what’s happening to the artists. All the sharing of the music, right? Is it correct that people share their music, fill up these devices with music they haven’t paid for? If you had Coca-Cola coming through the faucet in your kitchen, how much would you be willing to pay for Coca-Cola? There you go. That’s what happened to the record business.”

–UMG CEO Doug Morris, Wired, Nov. 27

Offering its entire catalog of digitized video and music for free to the 19 million users of an upstart social-networking site was once about the furthest thing from Universal Music Group’s mind. Now, with the Internet rejiggering the music industry’s economic structure, it’s at the very top of it.

And so this morning, UMG said it would allow members of social network Imeem to stream its music for no charge, in exchange for a cut of the revenue from advertising aired while songs are playing. “Imeem has developed an innovative way to make our artists’ music a central part of the social-networking experience,” UMG CEO Doug Morris said in a statement. “They’ve done so the right way–by working with UMG to provide an exciting musical experience for consumers, while ensuring that our artists are fairly compensated.”

And ensuring that UMG is fairly compensated as well. As part of the deal, the company will get an equity stake in Imeem and is rumored to have received an upfront payment of more than $20 million.

UMG is the last of the ‘big four’ major labels to ink such a deal with Imeem, following in the footsteps of Warner Music Group, Sony BMG and EMI. All four majors–quite an achievement for a company that this past summer didn’t have a deal with any of them. Seems the music industry isn’t quite as wary of advertising-supported business models as it once was. “2008 is going to be the year of music labels trying to put themselves in front of everyone, no matter what business model it takes,” Forrester analyst James McQuivey told CNNMoney. “The labels have realized that you have to be everywhere on the Web, because the customer is everywhere. You need to put yourself in front of them when they make their entertainment decisions.”