Last August, when I wrote about Facebook’s evolution from a social network to a social utility, the lingo around the social networking phenomenon was well established. We friended college classmates, facestalked exes, posted public messages on walls, unwisely poked colleagues and watched the newsfeed update us on everyone’s recent activity.

In the context of recession, wars and sharp cuts in online advertising, however, Facebook’s path to profitability is under increased scrutiny. ROI for traditional online advertising on the social networking platfrom hasn’t panned out as Facebook execs might hope, as numerous bloggers wagged about in several reports last year.

Facebook Beacon was one approach to monetizing over a hundred million users, though a massive backlash put Mark Zuckerberg and company back on their heels. Beacon is back now, along with ‘Social Ads.”

Enter Facebook Connect. When it was announced in the May of 2008, developers and tech pundits took notice of the further extension of Facebook’s open API. TechCrunch saw it as a response to MySpace’s Data Availability.

Facebook Connect is the latest example of data portability, where users of one website can bring their established personal data, friends and preferences into another network. Connect allows Facebook users to their identity as an authenticating credential on third-party websites, desktop applications or mobile device.

Using Connect, users can log on to other websites using Facebook IDs. Users can choose to rebroadcast their actions on that third-party site to all of their friends within Facebook, whether it’s watching TV shows or movies on Hulu, CBS..com or CNN.com, Digging news stories, buying products or the like.

Does that sound familiar? It should — OpenID was supposed to be the decentralized single sign-on authentication system for the Internet. And before that, Microsoft’s Passport. Neither one has really caught on, for a variety of reasons.

It took until this past week for the buzz around Facebook Connect to really take off, when the New York Times broke the story of Facebook aiming to extend its reach across the Web, rolling out the system to Digg, Hulu and Discovery.com, among 24 other partners.

And, as Michael Calore explains on Wired, as Facebook Connect expands, OpenID’s challenges grow. Some pundits think it may be a fatal blow, because of Facebook’s reach, popularity and the partnerships it has worked out with other sites.

Facebook is being quite careful in its approach to Connect, given privacy concerns. If it pulls it off, however, the social networking giant will have unprecedented data about Internet users browsing, watching, commenting and buying habits to offer advertisers — and that might just be be worth something.

That’s a good thing, too, as some clarity in Facebook’s path to profitability would be timely. The costs of operating one of the world’s top 10 websites are staggering. According to this post from Frédéric Filloux, editor of Monday Note on Dan Farber’s Outside the Lines blog, Facebook has:

• 13,000 servers, with an estimated 50,000 more needed in 2009
• a million dollar monthly electricity bill and a half-million dollar monthly bandwidth tab
• 2 terabytes of data uploaded every day that require the purchase of one NetApp 3070 every week

With those kinds of numbers, the connection Facebook will need most may be one straight to your wallet.

Twitter, the wildly popular microblogging service, has spawned Yet Another Tech Acronym. I know, I know, YATA YATA YATA.

Stay with me. RT is to FWD as 2008 is to 1998, except on a larger stage. The Internet has grown a tad since the late 90s, after all. Just as your mom might once have forwarded you a link to the Hamsterdance, now she may RT a link to her a dynamite turkey gravy recipe. (I say ‘your’ mom because I’m still working on getting mine to read my work online instead of printing it out.)

In of itself, the addition of retweet to the list of online conventions spawned by Twitter might not inspire an avalanche of commentary.

Many netizens already simply refer to one another with “@username,” dropping a domain name, surnames and other non-essential clutter. Usage usually drives meaning in language. When you have only 140 characters to work in, however, concision drives usage.

Similarly, if you “@username” someone on a discussion board or comment section on a blog, you’re replying specifically to them. Websites that chronicle and translate the lingo on Twitter are springing up everywhere, like the Twitter Glossary, Twittonary and the Twictionary.

Retweet, however, is worth another look. The word garnered special mention over the past weekend by some of the most influential social media pundits around in the blogosphere, including Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang, who posted Retweet: The Infectious Power of the Word Of Mouth, and Shel Israel, who wrote that ‘retweeting is the most powerful single aspect of Twitter.’

So what is it?

To retweet is to repost the tweet of another Twitter user using your own account.

Most users shorten “retweet” to RT and add it at the beginning of the tweet. RT is followed by the @username of the user being retweeted and then the body of the tweet, including links.

A tweet, if you missed it, is the tongue-in-beak name for a single post to your microblog.

Why is RT important? If you’re trying to understand social media, influence marketing and Internet culture, go back and read those posts from Shel and Jeremiah.

When you RT someone’s message, you’re endorsing the idea, link, question or answer to your network of subscribers, along with anyone monitoring Twitter for hashtags or brands that you might mention. They in turn can RT your message, quickly spreading the message globally. In a time where breaking news often shows up on Twitter hours before it hits the broadcast networks, the power of the RT is substantial.

Intellectual property law and editorial standards around the retweet are, like the term itself, still to be defined. Should you add in your own comments and, if so, how? [Brackets, for example. -Ed.]

Should you always attribute the original tweet or only the most recent retweeter?

If a Twitter account has a dollar value or is a corporate entitity, should there be affiliate advertising dollars if your users click on a link?

Should enterprise microblogging platforms have an automatic RT function?

Some answers are already cropping up in the blogosphere. For instance:

• Mike Templeton was thinking about similar issues when he asked ‘Is there a format for retweeting?‘ on Microblink.

• AJ Vaynerchuk described the art and science of retweeting for Twitteraholics.

• David Risley wondered whether assigning a dollar value to a twitter account is just wrong.

As I’ve written before, every age has its own language and lingo that reflects the industry and conventions of the time. The information economy is no exception. The Internet has spawned any number of subdialects, as l33tspeak, marketing, PR spin, consulting boilerplate and engineering shorthand, blending together into a global conversation.

Increasingly, we’re being asked to translate language like “OMG! Did you see that comment from a spambot on your blog? LMAO. Stop tweeting and mod the trolls!” into something that approaches normal language. If you need a handy reference, BTW, make sure to bookmark and use our list of chat, text messaging and IM abbrevations.

Grammarians may be dismayed at the neologisms being spawned but usually end up accepting ‘cyberspeak’ like blog, podcast and wiki into general usage. Even “Meh” has been accepted into the dictionary. We’ll see if ‘retweet’ shows up soon, though I expect they’ll have to define ‘tweet’ first.

Now, go do me a favor and RT this post. In the meantime, I need to print it out for Mom to read over Thanksgiving.

Is the future of computing in the clouds? Ray Ozzie, who took on the mantle as Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect when Bill Gates retired, thinks that the answer may be “yes” — at least on the back end.

In his keynote speech on Monday at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference, Ozzie announced Windows Azure, a new cloud computing operating system (OS). The platform is a key component of Microsoft’s strategy, presumably one that Ozzie has been working on since 2005, when he talked about the future of Windows Live services.

Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference has been around since 1992, when, according to Wikipedia, the Win32 API was first demonstrated and “Chicago,” the codename for Windows 95, was first mentioned.

For the rest of the 1990s, if you wanted to know what new technology Microsoft would be introducing, there was no better place to be. IT industry veterans refer to it simply as “PDC,” an acronym you’ll see frequently in online shorthand. (Note: You can track hashtags for this year’s conference on Twitter under PDC08 or PDC2008, though just PDC produces plenty of hits as well.)

Now, in the late “oughts,” there are of course many other IT conferences that address technologies important to IT professionals and consumers alike. Even so, Microsoft still uses the platform afforded by PDC to introduce initiatives that will be of great interest to the Windows development community. This year was no different.

With this announcement, Redmond-based software giant now appears to be embracing the platform as a service (PaaS) paradigm similar to that deployed by Google and Amazon. While on one level, this is similar to the software as a service (SaaS) distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over the Internet, Microsoft vision is even more ambitious.

In Ozzie’s view, Azure is a massive, highly scalable service platform that will allow both individuals and corporate customers to build applications in the cloud. In fact, it’s an entire new tier of computing. If the PC was the first tier and the enterprise the second, the Web-facing tier is the third, made up of Internet-facing systems for computation, storage, networking, application hosting, etc. In other words, the sorts of things that Amazon offers through its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

If you develop an application and need to scale it from 10,000 users to 10 million — quickly — these platforms can help.

Ozzie differentiated Azure from other PaaS precisely through its integration with the Windows ecosystem. Azure builds further upon the programming support for the Web services introduced by .NET and the synchronization of data extended to consumers through Live Mesh.

Microsoft hopes to attract developers with support for popular standards like SOAP, REST & XML, especially those already familar with Visual Studio.

The Azure Services Platform will allow developers to build applications out “in the cloud” that are available to PCs, online users and everyone in between, including thin clients like the iPhone or netPCs. Windows Azure will be the component for hosting and scalable storage, computation and networking for Web services.

Other key components of the Azure Services Platform (which I’ll avoid calling an ASP, as much as the shoe might fit) include:

• Microsoft SQL Services
• Microsoft .Net Services
• Live Services,
• Microsoft SharePoint Services
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services

The introduction of Azure is about much more than simply competing with Amazon or Google. It’s about finding a way to remain relevant in future that might not involve everyone using Windows as a desktop operating system, Office for office productivity applications or Exchange for email, at least as we recognize them.

Microsoft is now pitching a vision to businesses that resembles a pay-as-you-go model, the sort of paradigm that might make sense to, say, early adopters of IT chargeback systems. If a business wants to add on more services, liked hosted email or application storage, it can increase or add a subcription. Azure will provide a common foundation for the Live versions of its applications to be run — and businesses a means to save money by hosting services externally.

This isn’t going to happen right away — Microsoft won’t actually roll anything out until 2009. Developers are still getting acquainted with new tools for building hosted applications.

If this vision catches on, however, jokes about this cloud OS being vaporware are likely to be blown away, along with some of the concerns about Microsoft’s long-term prospects for growth in this Internet age.

I’m pinch hitting this week for the normal “designated blogger,” a useful metaphor given that the World Series is upon us. (Hats off to the Tampa Bay Rays, who defeated the hometown team in Boston, though not before enduring the biggest playoff comeback in 79 years.)

This week’s buzzword is “First Click Free.” I was tempted to go with mail goggles — but that’s so early October.

First Click Free (FCF) is a new service for webmasters and online publishers that Google launched last Friday on Google’s Webmaster Central blog. It’s a bit difficult to keep up with the number of betas rolling out of Mountain View these days — but stay with me.

This one’s important.

With First Click Free, Google has launched a pre-emptive strike on search competition from MSN, Ask, Cuil, Yahoo! or anyone else that wants to wear the search giant’s crown.

If you start your search at google.com, you now gain a privileged view into digitally published content. Surfers, who now get instant access to pages where they were once blocked, are likely to love First Click Free. Publishers can now choose to offer teaser content or rich abstracts that pull visitors further into a site, gaining membership and generating leads.

As Nick Carr notes, however, “The web you see when you go through Google’s search engine is no longer the web you see when you don’t go through Google’s search engine.”

There’s now an even stronger incentive for every Web search to begin and end with Google. This is clearly great business. The question now is whether it’s good for the Web.

Philipp Lenssen spent some time addressing that question in his analysis of what’s good and bad about FCF at Google Blogoscoped. In a comment on to Nick Carr’s post on the cost of FCF, Google’s Matt Cutts wrote that “FCF is a pretty well-balanced way that publishers can surface content that would normally require a subscription or payment, without the risks of cloaking.”

FCF may be a great fit for digital publishers embracing a freemium model; for the rest, the costs and benefits are still emerging.

Note: As visitors to any of TechTarget’s network of more than 60 websites knows, many white papers, webcasts and tips require registration. Should our publishers choose to opt in to FCF, you’ll likely being seeing more of them.

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