Microsoft’s Live.com web portal has gotten a distinct social makeover. The new site now contains many “standards” of the social networking trade — custom profiles, messaging ability, blogging, and more. The folks at Redmond say that the service will eventually be connected with fifty content partners. While the move seems a bit odd coming from a more “traditional” company like Microsoft, it’s not all that uncommon for search sites to embrace social media. As some of you may remember, Yahoo attempted to do something similar a few months ago with their Profiles. The new, web 2.0-flavored Live.com is online now.

Twitter has officially hit the monumental “one billion message” milestone. The billionth Tweet is thought to have occurred sometime Wednesday. According to data supplied by social archival site Popacular, it took roughly two years and three months for the microblogging service to reach that level. By comparison, instant messaging services from Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft hit the billion message mark on a near daily basis. The people behind Twitter have no comment at this time.

Despite reports to the contrary, the use of social networking in business is still considered to be fairly controversial by many CEOs. According to a poll conducted by Burson-Marsteller and industry periodical PR Week, 29% said that using social media is an effective way to communicate with employees, consumers, and shareholders. An equal amount also claimed that using social services didn’t help their businesses at all. Moreover, only 18% of those surveyed have actually used social media services to inform their shareholders. While the jury may still be out concerning the use of web 2.0 technologies, most agree that the use of “web 1.0″ has indeed helped their business. Nearly 71% say their website is the best way to interact with others.

In other social networking news, MySpace has officially released the MySpace Primetime Application (or MPA for short), a new app designed to take their video offering to the next level. The MPA allows users to quickly find videos from not only MySpace TV, but Hulu as well. Once the desired video is located, users can then post it onto their pages, just like always. “Video on MySpace flows throughout the network as there are multiple entry points where videos can be discovered,” MySpace Vice President Jason Kirk told WebProNews. “We believe the 76 million US users spending four hours on the site every month, and the advertisers that rely on our ad-solutions, will be happy with the flexibility of this application.” MySpace Primetime Application is available now.

And finally, there’s Happenr. Happenr is a so-called “events search engine” designed to tell you what’s happening on the continent of Europe. The engine scours several diverse databases and the cultural calendars of over one-hundred cities, all in an effort to keep your hypothetical itinerary as “up to date” as humanly possible. Results can be displayed in English, German, and Dutch. To top it all off, the Happenr API is available for free on the site, meaning that other sites can tap into its interesting European goodness. Happenr is up and running on a PC near you. An iPhone application is also in the works.