Social Media Minute: MySpace and Facebook 'Like' Each Other, Apple's Ping

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• MySpace Users Can Now Update Facebook Status Simultaneously
• Twitter Changes Mean Never Giving Your Password Out Again
• Older Adults Taking Up Social Media
• Apple's Ping Launches As New iTunes Social Network

MySpace Users Can Now Update Facebook Status Simultaneously

As previously reported on the Social Media Minute, Facebook and MySpace have been making efforts to allow MySpace users to share content from MySpace to Facebook. Now, the companies have finalized the technical details and users can simultaneously update their status to Facebook from within MySpace. According to a MySpace executive, they do not see Facebook as a competitor.

As MocoNews points out, this move further pushes the idea that MySpace is now more of a site that provides content versus social networking capabilities. MySpace has long had an audience centered around music. Bands and music fans utilize MySpace to find and publicize music, especially from independent and lesser-known music artists.

Are you still using MySpace? Will you send your status updates to Facebook, as the new functionality allows? We rely upon Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic to simultaneously send updates to Twitter and Facebook, but it will be interesting to see if MySpace users desire to do the same with Facebook.

Twitter Changes Mean Never Giving Your Password Out Again

Twitter has made a change to how third party programs tie into the Twitter service. For the more geeky reader, Twitter has gone to using Oauth exclusively for third-party applications. In layman's terms, this means that if you ever want to share an article to Twitter using an application or website (such as NY Times), you should never be asked for your username and password from the site itself.

From now on, you should only sign into Twitter itself, and approve each application or website with an approve or deny level of access.

This means never handing out your passwords to any site that isn't Twitter.com — a move that means your Twitter credentials are more secure than before. Also, you can control access on an ongoing basis for all applications and services that use your Twitter account. To see which sites and applications that use your Twitter account, simply go to the Connections tab under settings in Twitter.

Older Adults Taking Up Social Media

A respected research firm has released new statistics on social media use by older Americans aged 55-64 that show a huge increase. Pew Internet has found that amongst Internet users in this age bracket, social networking use is up an astonishing 88%.

Further more, amongst those aged over 66, social networking use is up 100% in the April 2009 - May 2010 timeframe. By comparison, in those in the 18-29 age bracket, social media use was up a mere 13%.

As older adults hop onto sites such as Facebook, how is their use different than younger Internet uses? One example: Pew data shows that 19% of all Internet users regularly make use of status updates, but only one in ten respondents aged 50+ utilize status updates on a regular basis. Also, according to the reports author, email is still the most mainstream form of online contact for those aged 50 and over.

comments

Useful article?

 Email It      

Follow @cmswire

Related Articles:

• Twitter Acquisition Peeves Summify Users
• Skype App Finally Making its Way to Windows Phones
• Adobe Finalizes Acquisition: Is the Digital Marketing Suite Complete?

Tags: facebook, itunes, pew internet, ping, social media, social media minute, social networking, twitter

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• MySpace Users Can Now Update Facebook Status Simultaneously
• Twitter Changes Mean Never Giving Your Password Out Again
• Older Adults Taking Up Social Media
• Apple's Ping Launches As New iTunes Social Network