All the squawking in the world and all the pretty little anchorwomen trying to add spice to shouters and wankers like Jim Cramer and Larry Kudlow aren't helping CNBC. The business network's audience is dropping faster than last year's stock market. Its October audience is down 50 percent compared with last October, according to Nielsen.

Is it time for another Rick Santelli rant? (Click above for a rerun.) Kiss-ass "biographies" of businesses and people with "passion" (like Sam Walton) aren't working.

Of course, just about every channel is down from last October's panic that drove everyone to subject themselves to cable 24/7 no matter how bad it was for their brains. (See the ratings roundup here.)

Unsurprising bad news for Barack Obama's futile and childish war against Fox News: The channel is still No. 1 by a way huge amount.

Now something else to worry about for those try to get jobs: your past posts on Facebook. "Facebook Activities Haunting Job Seekers," reports Baselinemag.com, which points out that "social networking poses a serious threat to job seekers who have posted inappropriate information about themselves."

Bosses are finding it so easy to check up on applicants' Facebooking info. Or, to put it another way, "tech geeks need to keep future interviewers in mind before bragging about their beer pong champion status or posting crazy pictures."

The real danger may be that a prospective boss would see that you're so boring and/or banal that he/she wouldn't want you around. So think twice about telling everyone that you're thinking of fixing some oatmeal or that you like puppies.

But if you've already made a fool of yourself on Facebook, maybe you can claim at your next job interview that someone stole your identity and posted all that bullshit.

Seriously, though, identity theft is supposedly reaching "epidemic" proportions, and practically all of it is because you're always on your damn computer, typing that banal bullshit into Facebook and Twitter, so hackers have you in their sights almost constantly.

All that bullshit you've tweeted on Twitter about yourself, your interests, your habits, every mundane detail of your desperate life — it's all about to finally pay off. Not for you, but for Twitter.

Biz Stone and his crew are getting ready to roll out "commercial accounts that will entice business users to pay for premium services like detailed analytics." Seems like a smart plan, and of course Twitter's been working on this for a while, and Biz Stone has of course been itching to get rolling on the moolah front. This new development from Twitter itself is not particularly good news for CoTweet, which is already helping businesses navigate through the tweet dreck.

Twitter's "pro accounts" would seem to make a lot more sense for advertisers and marketers than hoping that people will see their ads amid all the billions of posts. And it's better, in a way, for Twitter users because you won't see such plastered ads. What you will feel, however, is penetration into your own personal business by advertisers.

Wait till they get their hands on all that detailed info you've given them for free.

Maybe you don't mind behavioral targeting — you may even embrace the idea of someone taking all your social networking on Twitter and Facebook and detailed records of your Google search activity and turning it over to advertisers, the government, et al., so that various entities can check up on you, pander to you, or manipulate you.

As to the power of Twitter, here's just the latest tidbit: AdAge's "Could Twitter Destroy Hollywood's Marketing Magic?" It concerns the impact of "commenter culture" (ugh, what a phrase) on who goes to which movie.

Pushing product: It's kind of like the relationship that MSNBC already has with its parent, G.E. (Ask Keith Olbermann.)

The mind-boggling Hasbro/Discovery deal, aiming at those of you 14 and under, has been in the works for a few months, drawing heavy fire before G.I. Joe and My Little Pony trampled critics. Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood — good luck with that — had said of the deal:

And push product it will. Very true that there's no pretense whatsoever. Hasbro President and CEO Brian Goldner says: "We look forward to creating fun, stimulating and educational content that will allow us to deliver all-new brand experiences to the young and 'young at heart' - anywhere and anytime they want."

Discovery's already making a profit, so it wasn't exactly forced into the deal. The rebranded network is scheduled to debut in late 2010.

Will Google's new Wave drown both Twitter and Facebook before the latter two even have a chance to monetize their huge networks of Earthlings? PC World's David Coursey uses more than 140 characters to raise the question "Is Google Wave a Twitter Killer?":

Don't pay no never mind, Coursey says, to how Google is portraying Wave so far (Google's Wave page). It's not a foregone conclusion, he adds, that Wave will drown the competition — once it's seen as competition. But he does note that the rumors that Google would buy either Twitter or Facebook haven't come to pass. And why would Google do that when it's rolling out something as comprehensive as Wave? He writes:

Remember this: Google (unlike Facebook and Twitter) already knows how to make money off the Web by selling ads. And remember AOL and MySpace, both of which prove how quickly the Next Big Thing gets overtaken by the next one.

Even if Wave doesn't drown Twitter and Facebook, its all-in-oneness — its potential to spread the news, e-mail, blogging, etc. more efficiently — poses a grave threat to an already dying daily-newspaper industry.

His title? "Director of Digital Engagement."

As in the U.S., millions of characters in the U.K. are laying out their lives 140 characters at a time. Now the U.K. government's bureaucracy has stepped into Web 2.0 by appointing a chief of Twittering, an old-school type named Andrew Stott.

What's been free and easy until now — Twittering — may be on the way to becoming regulated and, at the expense of users, profit-making.

This is not making watchdog groups in the U.K. too happy. Taxpayer Alliance researcher Matthew Sinclair questioned the role of civil servants jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon:

Meanwhile, hints of trouble on Web 1.0, where Google's paid ad clicks plummeted in April, according to observers of the friendly but secretive Mountain View, California, giant of search services. In "Google money machine all cranked out?," Cade Metz of the Register (U.K.) points to a reportedly 26 percent drop in paid clicks during the four weeks ending May 9:

Doesn't look like it to me, and I'm not even a Twitterer.

In the meantime, go the Register (U.K.) for Lester Haines's "Pig plague and Twitter: The terrifying truth." The inimitable Haines writes:

Haines is referring to CNN's "Swine flu creates controversy on Twitter," in which the cable network (not the social network) notes:

Oh, so Twitter is a socially irresponsible thing? That means it will never die. Besides, it's just too easy to use Twitter, so it (or something very much like it) is surely not going away as a way to make instant, superficial contact and try to be super-popular. At the very least, Twitter will outlast daily newspapers, and it's an incredible self-promotional tool.

Meantime, more fun stuff about Twitter from the Register: "Loudmouth workers leaking data through social networking sites."

And this: "Pig plague 2.0: Can't spell 'pandemic' without 'panic.'"

And also this: "Twitter worm author gets security job."

But after you chuckle at the piece by Christopher Beam and Chris Wilson — "Barack Obama deleted the group Guantanamo Bay Detainees 4EVA. ... Khalid Sheikh Mohammed likes this. — turn to the N.Y. Post's Peter Lauria for some unfriendly Facebook news.

In "FACE(BOOK) VALUE: SOCIAL NETWORK CAN'T GET FRIENDLY FUNDING NUMBERS," Lauria reports that Facebook has been meeting with private-equity (read: leveraged-buyout) firms about raising billions.

When will Facebook start trying to seriously cash in on its network, which includes you, me, and about 200 million other people? It's only a matter of time before all of us will be assaulted by tailored marketing and millions more ads and schemes based on our Facebook-revealed desires. You may even me one of those millions who don't mind being the target of behavioral marketing. (See "Facebook marketing fuss: Blogosphere vs. statusphere vs. you," March 11)

It will happen, but there are obstacles — like disagreement over how many billions Facebook is currently worth. Lauria's well-done piece gets into it: