As the start-up describes itself, SocialMedia “is the leading provider of social-platform services. It fuses together three core features–management, marketing and monetization–into a comprehensive package that advertisers and developers can use to grow awareness, and grow their applications on social platforms.”

Translation: It sells the picks and axes and maps and other needed stuff to the widgeteers of this particular digital gold rush around the hyped social-networking space.

And you know who always makes most of the money in a gold rush? The seller of picks and axes and maps, that’s who!

And, in fact, SocialMedia is profitable, by selling its services to help third-party developers on social networks like Facebook. That includes conducting detailed analytics of the activity of widgets and forming an ad network on the space, based on data collected.

While powerhouse companies like Google have recently talked about the difficulty of making money from social networking, Goldstein, a longtime entrepreneur, thinks the market can better be cracked by new companies like his that understand the new medium.

He’s gotten $3.5 million in backing to do that from savvy investors, like former AOLer Jim Bankoff, entrepreneurs Ted Barnett and Marc Andreessen, as well as VC outfits like Charles River Ventures.

I make a lot of fun of widgets–more to come soon!–but I think Goldstein is a very sharp operator and brings much -needed seriousness and business acumen to a very juvenile market. As in: Adult supervision.

Here’s my visit to SocialMedia and interview with Goldstein (who, by the way, is married to another Web exec, Tina Sharkey, who heads BabyCenter and whom we video-visited here):

We knew if we waited long enough to post this visit to the San Francisco offices of niche community site BabyCenter–where we also did an interview with its adult supervision Tina Sharkey–that we’d get something good to hang it off of.

Thanks then to Sharkey, who was recently installed as global president of the Johnson & Johnson-owned–yes, the Q-tips and baby oil and shampoo folks–baby site.

She told a crowd at the Momentum Conference last week that lots of people are clamoring to buy the site. Three calls a week even! (Our mother doesn’t even call us that much and BoomTown has–let us just say–a very attentive mother.)

At the event, Sharkey added that if BabyCenter was for sale–which she also said it was not!!!–the price would be from $500 million to $1 billion. But it’s not! But a BILLION! But J&J will not part with it (though analysts say it should)! But it’s not for sale. Even though, let’s just say it anyway: Billion-Dollar-Baby!

Who knows? Nonetheless, after buying it for $10 million in the dregs of bankruptcy in 2001 and just completing a retrofit of the infrastructure and management, J&J has a nice property on its hands, and it recently added via acquisition a social-networking site called Maya’s Mom.

And, to my mind, the best thing it has going for it is Sharkey, who is the no-nonsense pro with a most perfect name for an exec. She’s an ex-AOLer (with big stints as co-founder of iVillage and working with Barry Diller), who has been around the dot-com block a time or two, which is a good thing.

We talked about social networking, brands online and also the importance of niche focus.

Here’s my video of the visit to its offices in the trendy South of Market part of San Francisco, as well as a longer chat with Sharkey.

Biggest bummer: No babies and no billions!

The event–this year at Foreign Cinema in the Mission District of San Francisco–is held to elicit feedback from the Internet’s movers and shakers about the new directions the conference, set to take place in San Francisco in mid-October, should head in.

Except Battelle and O’Reilly already came up with a theme: “The Web’s Edge.”

I am not entirely sure what that means. Is it that it is at an edge? Or that we need to look at the edge? Or just that things just feel all pointy lately? Big thoughts all!

In any case, the party was a lot of fun and filled with digital personalities, like Mitch Kapor and Ann Winblad, as well as a few folks I interviewed like ex-AOLer Jon Miller, ex-Fox exec Ross Levinsohn, VC David Sze, Tina Sharkey of BabyCenter and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain.

Here’s the video: