Newscorp has just sold MySpace for $35 million. That might sound like a lot of money, but six years ago they paid $580 million for it.

I used it as an example in some of my university lectures of how different the online world was from the offline because it has somewhere around 294 profiles set-up by Rupert Murdoch impersonators. And these impersonators aren’t there because they love Murdoch.

So here we had the media mogul alleged to be the most controlling in the world who tolerated wholesale pillory of himself, because if he didn’t it would ruin the value of his social networking site because he would have compromised its integrity by taking them down.

But it lost value anyway.

Which leads to my major point. FaceBook is currently valued at $82.9 billion, but don’t expect it to be around forever. The values of some of these online businesses are ephemeral compared to say a Microsoft.

When it comes to PCs Microsoft has a predominant spot because it is an essential tool on most computers when it comes to wordprocessing, spreadsheeting and email. Social networking sites are not an essential tool.

So FaceBook has to be a part of your online toolkit, but you need to keep an eye out for the “next big thing”, because social media is always moving, and what works today won’t work tomorrow.