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First it was on, then it was off then it was on again then it was off and then it was announced not with a bang but with a whimper. For those of you not really following up on the social network thing because you are to busy buried with SEO work to promote your websites the social network in question was, is and will be for some time to come now, Facebook.

Ever since Mark Zuckerberg founded the collegiate online social network site it has grown to almost 50 million users worldwide serving 54 billion pages per month which means that it has not gone unnoticed.

In the online world of opportunistic deals numbers, traffic and sizeable communities mean big bucks and it was not long before both Yahoo! (which has already been burnt with its 1993 Geocities purchase for $3 billion) and Google (which is more cautious and more forward thinking) came sniffing around.

Facebook said it did not want partners, it did not say much synch between search engines’ business models and its own and it declined various offers. Then Google came round again, exploring a deal, then Microsoft, then things died down a little until last Wednesday Mark Zuckenberg himself quietly announced that Microsoft was now a partner with a slender 1.6 per cent share and a commitment to put into the site $240 million!

Ok, forget the numbers, the deals, the online politics. What does this mean? With this deal Microsoft, which has seen rising profits thanks to rising sales of Halo 3 amongst other things, is placing itself as the exclusive advertising partner of Facebook on a global basis.

Microsoft does nothing without planning and this is the first shot across the online search engine dominance of Google. Microsoft recently unveiled the improvements it has made to its Live search (www.live.com) and has began to focus on a quiet, steady and dogged intent to overtake Google.

For those of us optimising our websites for the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) the real players here, seen by this move from Microsoft, are Google and MSN. Yahoo! are a spent force with nothing that they have done really working. Their online ads are a disappointment and their search is a joke.

This leaves Microsoft, which has deep pockets, to battle it out with Google in the hope that it can overtake it. So, stay focused, keep an eye on MSN’s Live Ads and do not get caught out by a sudden shift in the search engine landscape.

Face: the facts

Facebook

Number of users more than 49 million active users and 55,000 regional, work-related, collegiate and high school networks

Hits 54 billion page views per month; more than half of active users return daily

Users’ average stay in August 2007 14 minutes

Growth 3 per cent weekly growth since January; doubling of registered users since September 2006, when Facebook opened up to users outside colleges and universities

Sixth busiest site in the US

MySpace

Number of users more than 200 million - 69 million unique visitors in August

Hits 67 billion page views in August

Users’ average stay in August 26 minutes

Growth approximately 230,000 users added per day

Bebo

Number of users more than 34 million

Hits 7 billion monthly page views