Google killed Twitter today. With the launch of Google Buzz they ruthlessly attacked Twitter’s weaknesses and quietly set the scene for subsequent creeping infiltration into Microsoft’s stronghold in the enterprise market. Buzz is a big deal.

The performance marketing landscape changed dramatically last year when Performics, the third largest network, was sold along with its parent company DoubleClick to search giant Google. After more than a decade in the online marketing space, Performics became the Google Affiliate Network - gaining all the cachet of an association with Google, along with concerns from the privacy advocates about Google having too much information on advertisers and publishers. Chris Henger, group product manager for Google Affiliate Network, addresses those issues and talks about where GAN is headed.

Nearly a year ago, LinkShare president Steve Denton stepped down. The company named co-presidents. Jonathan Levine and Yasuhisa "Yaz" Iida are both veterans of LinkShare's parent company Rakuten.

Lisa Picarille: LinkShare is the only major network to have co-presidents. Give me the break down of your duties.

Facebook, of course, is the social networking site college students used to call their own. Since the site opened up to the general public, its profile has definitely been on the rise. Bay Partners' Facebook program - called AppFactory - will be aimed at giving entrepreneurs microbursts of funds as they need it, from $25,000 to $250,000 in as little as a few days' turnaround.

That venture capitalists would sustain a program for such a niche field as social network applications on a single website speaks volumes about how strong the tech sector is these days.

By their brief descriptions - "online auction website" and "Internet searching and online advertising company" - it does not sound like eBay and Google are rivals for the same business. But behind the boilerplate company descriptions, many experts claim that as these giants seek to grow even larger, they are going after the same types of acquisitions, which is exacerbating tensions that already exist between them.

Last night you read on your local newspaper's website about how gas prices could reach $4 a gallon this summer, so you went to a car site to check out some reviews about hybrid vehicles and then visited an automaker site to learn about the car prices. This morning when you checked your email, you saw two ads for hybrid cars.

Did you think - wow, this relevant ad sure is handy or, yikes, Big Brother is watching my every move?

The new geography features auction-based ad exchanges and conglomerated companies with divisions that buy, sell and distribute ads: something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

In early February, just six months after LinkShare agreed to be acquired by Japan-based e-commerce portal giant Rakuten for $425 million, the founders of the affiliate network have decided to step aside.

The resignations of Chairman and CEO Stephen Messer and President and COO Heidi Messer, who founded LinkShare in 1996, were not surprising according to industry watchers, but definitely signaled changing times in the performance marketing and affiliate marketing space.

The last of the big independent affiliate and performance marketing networks was finally swallowed up by another large international conglomerate.

In early September, Japanese e-commerce portal Rakuten took its first step into the U.S. market by agreeing to acquire privately held New York-based performance marketing network LinkShare for approximately $425 million in cash.

Suddenly, Joe Speiser's phone rings more often than it used to.

The calls are coming from venture investors and executives at some "very familiar companies" who've taken a sudden interest in buying all or part of AzoogleAds.com, the performance marketing company that Speiser co-founded four years ago.

"It just kind of started," he says, somewhat stunned by all the attention. "A lot of advertisers right now are just getting used to the idea of performance marketing. A couple of years ago, they didn't understand the concept."