Nickelodeon has ordered up another season of its popular animated television series “SpongeBob SquarePants” for a ninth season.

Yay!

No, really–it is the only kids’ show I have been able to endure so far.

Krabby Patties for all!

Here is the good video of its theme song:

Even as Groupon is poised to sell itself to Google for badillions of dollars, the attack of the social buying clones continues.

Today, it is the launch of FamilyFinds, a Santa Monica, Calif., start-up aimed at offering daily deals to families, with $5.75 million in funding to help it get going.

“Think relevance, plus an explosive market plus a great team,” said FamilyFinds CEO Matt Coffin, in an interview yesterday about the new site, whose first “holi-deal” today is “$10 Only-in-LA Santa Photos.”

Others to come include kid-focused live shows, skate rentals and holiday cruises that Coffin said are “hyper-local and demographically targeted.”

Coffin said, as a longtime entrepreneur, he was intrigued with the booming social e-commerce space. But, as a parent, he was less impressed, because of little in the way of personalization.

“I was somewhat disenchanted by the same offers that did not target me accurately,” he said.

(So is BoomTown, who is going to scream if I get another spa treatment or stripper pole lesson offer this week. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Thus, Coffin said FamilyFinds drills down on one audience–those who need to entertain and serve the little ones.

The former founder of LowerMyBills co-founded FamilyFinds with, among others, a blast from the Web 1.0 past: Former Disney Internet Group head Jake Winebaum.

At launch, FamilyFinds said it will focus on numerous communities across Los Angeles, although a national rollout is coming in 2011.

Split Rock Partners provided the Series A funding.

Here’s the official FamilyFinds press release:

FAMILYFINDS.COM ENTERS $1B LOCAL SOCIAL ECOMMERCE SPACE

Backed by $5.75 Million Investment, Leading Internet Veterans
Launch Vertical Family Daily Deal Site

(Santa Monica, CA) December 1, 2010–FamilyFinds, an online daily promotions site exclusively focused on services and experiences for families, officially launched today. This community-suggested and expert-curated destination advances the online daily deal space by combining a family focus with hyper-local geo targeting. The company also announced that it recently closed on a $5.75M Series A funding round backed by Split Rock Partners, strongly positioning them to be involved in of one of the fastest growing industries of all time.

FamilyFinds is led by Internet industry veterans who founded and ran several successful consumer businesses valued at over $1 billion, including the founder of FamilyFun magazine, who also ran the Disney Internet Group, and the founder of LowerMyBills. The team, all of them now parents, have created an online destination that will not only offer member families great deals on new and favorite neighborhood merchants, but will also provide information and resources to help them discover the best family activities in their own and nearby communities.

According to a recent study of moms*, over 70% use the Internet to find deals and discounts (the most popular activity) and 62% go online for entertainment and family activities. FamilyFinds addresses this trend by directly creating a single destination for moms and dads seeking deals and family activity ideas.

“Families, local and national brands, and member-based deals is a great combination for a big vertically focused business, and one that we believe is untapped,” said Matt Coffin, chief executive officer, FamilyFinds.com. “As parents and consumers ourselves, we know the key to unlocking this market is relevance, which means being local, curating deals and fun discoveries that create family memories, and delivering great value-based pricing.”

Through consumer testing and an early beta, FamilyFinds learned that consumer demand, especially for busy families, while value influenced, is also heavily influenced by proximity to the merchant. The company will follow a hyper-local model, offering great finds not just within specific cities around the United States, but within specific neighborhoods. For launch, prior to the nationwide roll-out in 2011, FamilyFinds will serve numerous communities across Los Angeles, including neighborhoods in the Valley, Pasadena, South Bay, City Central, and the Westside.

“We know that moms and families are social and use the Internet not just to find great opportunities for themselves, but also to share and coordinate these opportunities and their experiences with other families, friends and neighbors,: said Brian Barnum, president. “FamilyFinds is building a social layer over everything we do to infuse our core value proposition with insight and access to the larger community of families in our customers’ extended networks.”

FamilyFinds is the collaborative effort of Internet industry veterans and parents, including:

• CEO Matt Coffin, founder of LowerMyBills.com (sold to Experian) and active Internet investor including Demand Media, Buscape (sold), Rubicon Project, Mahalo, Machinima and social eCommerce companies Hautelook, ShoeDazzle and ecoMom.

• Jake Winebaum, who was co-founder of eCompanies, which launched Business.com, Jamdat and Boingo, and founder of FamilyFun magazine and led Disney’s entry to the Internet as Chairman of the Disney Internet Group.

• Doug Hirsch, who was VP of Product at Facebook, GM Yahoo Entertainment and Founder of DailyStrength.org.

• President Brian Barnum who was the President of RHD Interactive (a division of R.H. Donnelly, now Dex One Corp.) and both COO and CFO of Business.com and CFO of Rent.com (sold to eBay).

• Leading content and merchandising is Elizabeth Hurchalla, previous editor of BlackboardEats and co-founding producer of Yahoo! Food.

• Leading editorial is Julie Taylor, previous editor-in-chief at Momlogic.

• Leading sales is Terry McGovern, previous Director of Interactive Sales at Los Angeles Times and sales at AT&T local

A national poll released today by Common Sense Media asking how well social networks protect kids online produced an answer that should come as a shock to exactly no one:

Not very well, at least according to parents.

A full 75 percent of them gave social networking sites such as Facebook a negative rating for the task.

About 2,000 parents were polled by the nonprofit media organization, as well as 400 teens, who also gave thumbs down to social networks’ ability to police themselves.

There will be a big roundtable discussion on the topic in Washington, D.C., this morning, which will include Common Sense Media head Jim Steyer, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz and Deputy Secretary of Education Anthony Miller.

Along with the poll results, San Francisco-based Common Sense Media said it will also announce the launch of the “Protect Our Privacy–Protect Our Kids” campaign to help parents protect kids’ reputations and personal information online.

I love the smell of impending privacy legislation in the morning!

Already from Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts: “As the House author of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, I remain intently interested in ensuring that children are not targeted online and their privacy is strictly protected. Twelve years after the bill was signed into law, entire new technologies and industries have emerged that could put children’s safety at risk, making a legislative update necessary. I look forward to introducing such legislation to bring COPPA into the 21st century.”

Thus, here is more for pols to chew on: The bulk of those surveyed are more concerned with online privacy than they were five year ago (another obvious one); parents do not believe Web sites, including search engines such as Google (GOOG), should share the location of kids (count me in on that one too!); and teens think their friends overshare (you think?).

But instead of me telling you, just read it all here in top-line results for adults and teens, as well as in the official press release:

Final CSM adults topline

Final CSM teen topline

Privacy Poll Results and Campaign Launch

But even though you can use these services without leaving home, many of them still require you to go to a specific Web site — one you wouldn’t necessarily visit regularly. Sites like Gazelle.com and Venjuvo.com that pay cash for old electronics (or just recycle them) aren’t exactly online destinations.

Now one of those ways to unload your stuff involves a Web site you might visit many times a day. A site that has considerable sway in the social-networking world, where over 175 million active users go to share personal stories, photos and videos with hundreds of “friends.”

That’s right, I’m talking about Facebook. Tuesday, the social-networking giant announced its new Facebook Marketplace, Facebook.com/Marketplace, an integrated application powered by Oodle, known for its work with online classified ads. Marketplace uses colorful icons to represent four actions you can take in its app: Sell It; Sell for a Cause; Give it Away; and Ask for It.

Facebook Marketplace users can pick from 12 categories of listings, as well as buy or sell items for a favorite cause.

Oodle granted me early access to the Marketplace app before it became available Tuesday. A friend of mine and I were both set up with test accounts so that we could see one another’s fake Marketplace items and interact with one another within Marketplace; hundreds of Oodle employees also were testing this. (It was fun to see what people offer for sale when they’re just pretending, like one person who offered to sell everything on a colleague’s desk when he was out.)

Facebook’s original iteration of Marketplace started back in 2007, but was geared toward services like housing and jobs. The Oodle-powered Marketplace is merchandise-centric and includes more detailed organization, deeper integration with Facebook, and ways to buy or sell things to raise money for 1.7 million causes.

It still lacks a built-in electronic payment system, such as PayPal or Discover card, for exchanges between users or donations to causes. Instead, Marketplace encourages its users to exchange money however they choose, like traditional classified ads. And that could cause some obvious problems. For instance, if an item were sold for a cause, the seller could later donate the amount via credit card after closing a listing. But there’s no guarantee that the seller will actually do this. Oodle says it will listen to feedback from the Facebook audience and will try to integrate e-payments, if preferred.

Every posted item can include a location, description, category, photo and an explanation of why it’s in the Marketplace. Each item is reviewed by Oodle’s fraud-detection program, which looks for inappropriate content and suspicious activity, and a post could take up to 30 minutes to appear online after you submit it. My posts displayed almost instantly in the Marketplace newsfeed. Users also can opt to publish their posts to their Facebook profiles.

One example of Marketplace’s newly detailed organization comes in its browsing options. The old version of Marketplace had options to browse through jobs and housing, but not specific categories of items for sale. Now, users can browse through 12 categories of specific items including “Home & Garden,” “Baby & Kid Stuff,” “Tickets” and “Musical Instruments.” Items that don’t fit into these 12 categories are put into an “Everything Else” category.

Each item in Marketplace integrates with Facebook’s familiar format, like having its own online “wall” where questions and comments appear. If you’re looking for something in Marketplace by using the “Ask for It” option, you can recruit people to help you find the item by selecting from your list of friends, which works the same way people can suggest Facebook people to friends who might know them. Glancing at an item shows the seller’s profile photo, a link to all of the person’s listings and a brief history of his or her overall Marketplace activity, such as “3 listings in the last month.”

The integration of charitable causes into Marketplace gives supporters new ways to raise money for a favorite group like the World Wildlife Fund or Habitat for Humanity International. On the Marketplace home page, causes are displayed in a right-hand panel with a daily featured cause. This Featured Cause shows who else supports it and how many items you can buy or sell to support it.

Privacy is a natural concern in online marketplaces. By default, your posted listings are visible to any Facebook member in Marketplace. Users can opt to remain anonymous — they’re listed as “Facebook user is selling a bike,” for example. In that case, the only way someone can contact that person is by posting a comment and waiting for the seller to respond.

People who aren’t members of Facebook can see your listings by browsing and searching Marketplace, but they can’t post, comment or contact users. Unlike online marketplaces or services that can be used by anyone, Marketplace requires that users be members of the site to interact with sellers, which can be a downside. Plenty of people who aren’t on Facebook might not want to join the social-networking phenomenon just to offload the old couch gathering dust in the garage.

All user notifications — messages indicated in red at the bottom right of a Facebook page — will reflect friends’ activities in the Marketplace, unless you reset the notifications of the Facebook Marketplace app to not notify you. I suggest doing this, unless you really want to know about all your friends’ activities in Marketplace.

Four color-coded icons represent activities in Marketplace and are useful when reading lists of items at a glance: A green dollar sign represents Sell It and a red heart represents Sell for a Cause, for example. And details about each cause are integrated within Marketplace.

The Oodle-powered Facebook Marketplace is straightforward and well organized, and if you’re a Facebook user, its format will be familiar. If you’re not, and you’re looking for a way to sell or give items away for a charity or otherwise, Marketplace might encourage you to join the giant social network. But its payment program could be made a lot easier with electronic options.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com

After having just visited WeeWorld in London, an avatar-based site that allows mostly young people to create online personas for social networking and other activities around the Web, it was interesting to see Walt Disney last week forking over up to $700 million to own another popular social-networking site for “tweens” called Club Penguin.

As much as I despise that icky marketing term to signify kids on the cusp of becoming teenagers, to spend that much money to get its hands on that market is an interesting indicator of the desperation of older media companies to latch onto a big trend and also the perplexing development of the social-networking business, where the cart is so far in front of the horse that it’s almost laughable.

I have to give Canadian-based Club Penguin props for building a site in only two years that has attracted 12 million registered users and about 5 million monthly unique visitors–700,000 of whom pay a monthly fee of almost $6 to play in the virtual online space.

But its purchase price is still way high compared to its revenues (especially since no advertising is one of the attractions of this site to parents) and now sticks a large no-discount sticker all over the Web for such sites.

True, Club Penguin has been a raging success, especially compared to Disney’s own recent efforts at sites like Toontown. Perhaps that is due in part to that site’s not-so-punny catchphrase on top of its newspaper-like homepage: “The Best Game in the Tooniverse” with a price of “Five Jellybeans,” which just screams to kids: lame.

So Disney is paying the price for an inability to innovate online in the space–as it did before in an odd deja vu to a lot of Disney online efforts, including a premium site called Blast and when it bought Infoseek and turned it into the clunky Go portal.

Ponying up $350 million in cash with promises of $350 million more if certain performance criteria are met speaks volumes to me about this key problem Disney has long had on the Web–how to grow its original online media organically, beyond the basics of theme-park ticketing and other obvious stuff around its established products.

This time, Disney is not fooling around, it seems. “We plan to rename it Disney’s Club Penguin and to immediately use our Disney-branded properties such as Disney.com, Disney Channel, Radio Disney and our parks and resorts to raise its profiles,” said Disney CEO Robert Iger on a recent quarterly call. “We believe virtual worlds can extend and expand on the life of a franchise, expand our global reach for our entertainment content and allow us direct contact with our consumers in a more personalized and engaging way.”

Now, I have been a big admirer of the recent digital efforts of Iger, whom we interviewed at D4, such as his aggressive move into streaming and selling television content on the Web (how much do I love its ABC.com player, for example?).

Perhaps this is part of that drive, but it is unclear if paying these kind of prices will get Disney there, even without all the marketing muscle it brings to bear.

Even if Club Penguin is trumpeted all over the massive Disney universe from theme park to cable channel (that started immediately), the purchase is risky on a very basic level, given the cost and the nature of kids’ fast-changing preferences. Neopets? Webkins? And for us older demographic: Furby, Beanie Babies and Cabbage Patch Kids.

And, of course–and here I am really dating myself–the Pet Rock.