Myspace News & Articles

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

• It's all About Location, Location, Location at SXSWi
• Guy Kawasaki Launches Personalized Alltop
• MySpace Enhances Data Portability
• Twitter Search Traffic to Pass Google Blog Search
• Kevin Rose Launches Twitter User Directory WeFollow

Social media are changing the way that businesses interact with the customers on a massive level. Not only have they changed the way of organizational interaction with customers, social media and social networks have brought new customer relationship management (CRM) opportunities, if done right.

While social media may be revolutionizing how businesses are able manage customer relationships. The problem is how to implement social media initiatives successfully in CRM on an enterprise level.

Social Media moves so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Here’s the week’s top stories, in scan-friendly format.

This week:

• TechCrunch Is Full of What?
• Social Networking Attracts 75% of Online Europeans - comScore
• Zcapes Launches Microblogging/Activity Stream Service For Mobile Web
• Baby Boomers Using Social Media
• Yelp.com Outed For Mafia-Like Extortion

Desktop or browser-integrated blogging applications have been around for some time now and many are quite similar in function. Blogging suggestion tools that will suggest related articles, images and links based on what you are writing are also not new. But a partnership between ScribeFire and Zemanta bring the two together in an single browser add-on setup.

Facebook has been offering advertising space now for some time, but it hasn’t had the overall effect that the social network powerhouse is looking for. For the last year Facebook has supposedly been working on a new style of Engagement Ads. They bring social and viral to advertising in a whole new way. Some are concerned though that the ads will bring the potential for private data to be sold.

According to the report Nothing But Net: Outlook for Global Internet Stocks in 2009, released on Monday (Jan. 5, 2009) by J.P. Morgan Securities Inc., performance-based advertising has gained a larger and larger share of the total online advertising market over the past five years. In particular, the report isolates online video, social networking and Brand Ads for growth analysis.

And why not PBA? Who wins when some convoluted methodology is put in place whereby every site becomes an affilliate marketer? No up front conventional brand ad placement costs, the onus of generating leads is shifted to the ad host, no remuneration for the creativity behind a site that generates millions of CPM’s—the advertiser wins! Another lurch toward institutionalized chiseling and no-risk corporate shenanigans. 

A funny thing that’s developed in the last few years is a shared interest in the latest trends by teens and adults. At least, we’re made to think it’s a tad odd, and surely greasy-faced adolescents are horrified at the thought of getting an add request from their parents on MySpace.

But at the same time, when it comes to things as explosive and powerful as social networking, is a shared interest really all that strange? After all, adults are people too, and as Pew Internet & American Life Project reports, their motives for joining a network are a little more colorful than one might think.

In these days nearly every tech company is seeking the holy grail of new services, software, SaaS options or enterprise 2.0 solutions. The organizations want to get that edge they may need to hold their ground.

However, it seems a little odd that anyone would think that another webmail client is really what we need. MySpace seems to think this is the case, and has a stealth webmail client in the works as their newest 1-2 punch.

At long last, the Comscore year-end numbers for the major social networks are available. The numbers indicate Facebook, already the worldwide leader, is on track to overtake MySpace for unique visitors in the US by 2010.

One could see this as a victory of order over chaos.

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

This Week:

• Windows Live Becomes Social Media Hub
• Mince Your Facebook Friends for a Free Whopper
• New Twitter Services to chew on: Tweetbacks and TwtApps
• Digg Persists in Making No Money
• MySpace and Yahoo on your TV
• Twitter still can't handle MacWorld 

Windows Live Becomes Social Media Hub

The walls between the social platforms continue to fall away. Steve Ballmer has just announced a new Windows Live feature which will give you status reports and allow you to interact with your various Social accounts through your Live email. ElectricPig reports on the new Microsoft initiative:

"The announcement... means that you’ll be able to log in to the new Windows Live Essential suite with one password and have all your updates from everything from Twitter to Flickr, and more than 50 other social networks now including Facebook amalgamated on one page. Think of it as an RSS feed to see what your friends are up to."

With the economy growing worse by the day companies are looking to do everything they can to eliminate dead weight. Much like when SixApart nabbed Pownce and stated they were shutting it down, MySpace is following suit and may shut down Flektor.

Flektor is a slideshow creation tool that MySpace acquired back in 2007. At the time the acquisition seemed to make sense. Flektor’s goal was to provide a way for users to generate quality, video-style content without all the poorly-shot or stolen video you see around the web generated by users.

MySpace announced their data portability initiative way back in May, but haven't had much to say about it since, spending more time on user experience enhancements such as Profile 2.0. Well now they've finally come out of the closet and made some announcements regarding their latest service MySpaceID and connecting to Google's Friend Connect. Should Facebook be looking worried?

After MySpace came along and stole Friendster’s audience and spotlight, the next big shark to-be to join the pool was Facebook. Yes, the Social Media wars had officially begun. Naturally, after the birth of and bandwagon jumping between those three players, a social network platform boom happened, with products of all shapes and sizes. Today you can say: “I want a micro social network for my business” and we’d suggest Plum as the way to go.

You could even hint at how you’ve been itching for a network based on your creepy love for bellybutton lint and we’d tell you (gingerly) to go make one and bond with other lint lovers using Ning. And now, thanks to a Stockholm-based company called FileRide, you can even dream of social networks for inanimate things like the files on your computer, and we’d still be able to point you in the right direction.

You’re probably all aware that MySpace has been losing the social network popularity contest as of late. In what seems like an attempt to get back into the game, they recently released Profile v2.0.

The two most significant changes included in this optional upgrade are advanced privacy options and the near complete adherence to W3C HTML standards. Granular privacy controls allow users to assign different privacy settings to different sections (something Facebook still lacks).

Other new features include drag-and-drop profile customization and a handful of themes that are only marginally more impressive than the ones available for version 1.0.

Unfortunately for MySpace, word on the street is that in spite of the new privacy features and the ever exciting column width customization option, users don’t really like it. Complaints heard ‘round the Webverse include that the resizing doesn’t work, many of the layouts offered on free customization code sites aren’t compatible and that it sucks in general.

Fortunately for users, MySpace will save old profiles for a total of 90 days, and should you want to switch back you can do so at any point during that timeframe. Interestingly, MySpace doesn’t make it exactly easy to switch back, as the button to do so is misleading. Of course, complaints have surfaced about that as well.

Love it? Hate it? Got a better reason than, “It’s cool” or “It sucks”? Let us know.

Social Media moves so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Here’s the week’s big news from the space, in scan-friendly format.

This Week:

• Kevin Rose says forget Web 2.0 or 3.0 — make your startup Web 2.5
• New MySpace Drag’n’Drop Interface
• Twitter a terrorist tool?
• Gilbane Conference on Social Media Meets CMS
• Forrester Report says Social Web Went Mainstream in ‘08

Kevin Rose says forget Web 2.0 or 3.0 — make your startup Web 2.5

When Digg supremo Kevin Rose isn’t playing the beer-swilling buffoon on DiggNation, he’s capable of putting in a shift as an extremely thoughtful business-evangelist type.

Never more so than in a recent Seesmic blog post , in which he takes a Paul Graham post on “Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy” and runs with it, concluding that once the boulder really got rolling, nearly all web 2.0 start-ups simply got lost in the noise and couldn’t gain any traction.

Digg, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and most of the services which we associate with the Web 2.0 tag all launched before that tag even made any sense. If you could apply the label “Web 2.0” to a new web startup, chances are it sank without trace (some obvious exceptions like Twitter aside).

Rose also talks about the early days of Digg (it’s only 4 years old??), recounting that it was a ‘scappy startup’, that he kept the day-job and pumped in a couple of thousand dollars here and a couple thousand there, and that he only went after Angel funding when he ran out of money. While doing things on the cheap may be anathema to the current brood of Web entrepeneurs, Rose reckons it’s by no means a bad thing for your startup if you can’t get money for your ‘back-of-the-envelope’ idea, and if you have to hold onto the day-job for a while.