Facebook slowly becoming known as the do anything for money internet business attempts to hit Google below the belt but gets caught.

It seems like the ongoing rivalry between Facebook and Google has taken a turn for the subversive. Last night, a spokesman for the social network confirmed to the Daily Beast that Facebook paid a top PR firm to spread anti-Google stories across the media and to encourage various outlets to examine allegations that the Mountain View company was violating user privacy. The PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, even offered to help blogger Chris Soghoian write a critical op-ed piece about Social Circle — a service that allows Gmail users to access information on so-called “secondary connections,” or friends of their friends. Social Circle, in fact, seems to have been at the epicenter of Facebook’s smear campaign. In a pitch to journalists, Burson described the tool in borderline apocalyptic terms:

“The American people must be made aware of the now immediate intrusions into their deeply personal lives Google is cataloging and broadcasting every minute of every day-without their permission.”

Soghoian thought that Burson’s representatives were “making a mountain out of a molehill,” so he decided to prod them about which company they might be working for. When Burson refused to spill the beans, Soghoian went public and published all of the e-mails sent between him and the firm. USA Today picked up on the story, before concluding that any claims of a smear campaign were unfounded. The Daily Beast’s Dan Lyons, however, apparently forced Facebook’s hand after confronting the company with “evidence” of its involvement. A Facebook spokesman said the social network hired Burson to do its Nixonian dirty work for two primary reasons: it genuinely believes that Google is violating consumer privacy and it also suspects that its rival “may be improperly using data they have scraped about Facebook users.” In other words, their actions were motivated by both “altruistic” and self-serving agendas, though we’d be willing to bet that the latter slightly outweighed the former. Google, meanwhile, has yet to comment on the story, saying that it still needs more time to wrap its head around everything — which might just be the most appropriate “no comment” we’ve ever heard.

Facebook Buying Out Skype? $4 Billion Deal Was Being Talked About. Now the hammer has been dropped and the winner is Microsoft at 8.5 Billion (yes billion). We just hope Microsoft doesn’t screw things up, skype is near perfect.

After rumors that first Facebook and then Microsoft were in talks to acquire Skype, the latter announced that it has acquired the VoIP giant for $8.5 billion in cash.

Skype will be integrated into Microsoft devices and systems such as Xbox and Kinect, Xbox Live, the Windows Phone, Lync and Outlook, Microsoft said in a statement. The company has pledged to continue supporting and developing Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms as well.

The deal, which was spearheaded by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer with assistance from Charles Songhurst, the company’s head of corporate strategy, was completed Monday evening, AllThingsD reported earlier.

The acquisition is an expensive one for Microsoft. Not only is it the largest price Microsoft has paid for a company in decades, Skype is not yet profitable. Despite revenues totaling $860 million last year and operating profits of $264 million, the company lost $6.9 million overall, according to documents filed with the SEC. And the company carries $686 million in debt.

Much of the company’s appeal rests in its largest user base of 663 million, 145 million of which use Skype monthly (Update: Microsoft says Skype has 170 million regular users), and 8.8 million of which are paying customers.

There is one clear set of winners here: Skype’s investors. A group including Silver Lake, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) Investment Board purchased the company from eBay for $2.75 billion in September 2009.

In August, Skype filed for an IPO but put plans on hold after Tony Bates joined the company as CEO in October. Bates will take on the title of president of the Microsoft Skype Division and report directly to Ballmer.

The new-this-year-yet-somehow-already-ubiquitous Facebook Like button has been around just long enough to generate some interesting numbers relating to Facebook users and web traffic.

The button, which launched in April at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, is now present on roughly 2 million sites around the web, from sports sites to news organizations and many other kinds of publishers.

A media analytics lead on Facebook’s Developer Network Insights team crunched some numbers and found that Facebook Likes not only generate interesting data about the “likers” (a.k.a. Facebook users who are also active on your website) themselves; this data also speaks volumes about clickthrough rates, time on-site and other engagement metrics.

Stats about people

On average, a Facebook user who “likes” your content has more than double the number of friends than does a typical Facebook user. This could mean the user is more “social” or more influential; on the other hand, it could mean the user is an attention-seeking narcissist.

While it’s fatuous to read too much into that statistic, the number does show that the average “liker” is more active from a social-web standpoint.

An even more interesting stat about the likers is that they click on five times more links to external sites than the typical Facebook user. If clickthroughs are what you’re looking for from your social media strategy, this is good news.

Here’s a stat just for news sites: The average Facebook user who “likes” content on a news website is 34 — that’s about 2 decades younger than the average newspaper subscriber.

We’ve known for some time that the future of journalism and social media are, at this point, inextricably linked; this stat provides a little hard evidence for that conclusion.

Stats about traffic

Most website owners are aware that Twitter refers a ton of traffic. It’s meant to be a content-referral network, so link-sharing and clickthroughs are a given in many cases.

The Facebook “Like” button, however, might be bringing Facebook closer to competing with Twitter in the area of referral traffic, though.

Since the button launched and was integrated on millions of sites, many publishers are reporting large increases in traffic specifically due to this kind of social plugin. ABC News reported a 190 percent increase; Gawker’s traffic shot up by 200 percent; Sporting News said their site traffic was up by a shocking 500 percent; and NBA.com said that Facebook had become their second-largest referral source.

Facebook relays messages from publishers saying that these users “are more engaged and stay longer when their real identity and real friends are driving the experience through social plugins.”

As an example, NHL.com reported that pages per user was up by 92 percent, time on-site was up by 85 percent, video-viewing increased by 86 percent more videos and overall visits went up by 36 percent.

Clearly, Facebook is only part of social media referral traffic, but it’s becoming a larger part as the network grows and users become accustomed to interacting with third-party and external content from within the comfort of their social graph.

The world discovered a little bit more about this mysterious “Google Me” project this week, when Googlers, including CEO Eric Schmidt opened up (just a little bit) at the company’s Zeitgeist event.

The main thing that has been revealed is that Google Me will not be a new social network from Google to try and compete with Facebook, but rather a “social layer” added to existing Google products. If you think about it, this strategy makes more sense, as Google already has many of the features of a great social network in its various properties. As I’ve said over and over again, integration among these is the key, and “Google Me” just might turn out to be that integration that connects Google’s offerings, effectively making Google itself the social network.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch was able to pick up one specific detail from unnamed “sources who’ve worked with Google on the product”. They say that Google Me will produce an activity stream generated by all Google products, and that Google Buzz has been rewritten to be the host of it all.

I’m guessing the existing Google Profiles, which already host the Google Buzz content will be central.

Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook thinks photos and videos are going to be key elements in the competition between Google and Facebook.  He writes, “Between tagging and the feed exposure, photos account for the largest percentage of Facebook users’ time on site. While video is also increasing, photos were responsible for most of Facebook’s initial growth. In fact Facebook Photos now has more market share than all the competitors combined (including Google-owned Picasa). Google also clearly has another massive weapon in their arsenal: YouTube. The video site is by far the most popular of all video sites in the world.”

“YouTube is so popular that it ranks just behind Facebook in Alexa’s ranking of the most popular online sites,” he adds. “YouTube is also a relatively social experience to begin with, however there is most definitely plenty of room to grow.”

YouTube is easily the greatest asset Google has in terms of social media. You may recall that YouTube began requiring all users to have a Google account. That’s no coincidence, I’m sure.

So let’s compare Google (as one big social network) to Facebook, feature by feature.

Facebook has the news feed. Google is reportedly working on the activity stream. Facebook has chat. Google does too (text, voice, and video). Facebook has photos. Google does too, with Picasa Web Albums and various other complementary photo-related offerings. Facebook has videos. Google has YouTube (and Google Video). Facebook has notes. Google has Blogger. Facebook has Pages. Google has Profiles.  Google has email. Facebook may at some point (MySpace just added it last year). Facebook has games. Google is working on getting more. Facebook has news publications setting up Pages. Google has Google News. Facebook has the Open Graph. Google has search (all kinds of search…and maps).

Facebook has Facebook Ads. Google has AdWords, AdSense, and Doubleclick. Facebook has applications. Google has Google Apps, the Apps Marketplace, Android, the Android Marketplace, Chrome, Chrome OS, the Chrome Web Store, Google TV which will support Android apps and web apps. Google is also trying to get a music service off the ground.  And let’s not forget Google Calendar and Google Reader – two very user-personalized products.