Myspace News & Articles

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.

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

This Week:

• MySpace to Trounce Facebook With US$1 Billion ‘08 Sales
• Jobs Cut at Seesmic, but Digg is Hiring
• Twitter Gets New CEO
• Yahoo! Launches New Profiles, Social Strategy
• Browser Wars 1: New FireFox Beta 3.1 has Geolocation API
• Browser Wars 2: Flock Upgrade
• Twitter-Watch: Joe the Plumber

Chances are that your online social networking habits are bringing you online via your phone.

A recent survey by ABI Research reports that almost half of those using online social networks have visited a social network through a mobile phone, with MySpace and Facebook being the most popular sites visited.

Just curious, but do you think even though they are competitors, the top guns at MySpace, Facebook and Google spend all their time on Gmail chatting about when and how they’ll release the news of their latest endeavors to move towards data portability?

Or maybe they have spies in each other’s camps sending smoke signals home at night spilling the beans of latest plans to take over your data profile? Flashbacks to Pinky and Brain cartoons spill over into my daytime routine.

In either case, it’s been a busy couple of weeks with Facebook announcing Facebook Connect, then last night Google previewed Friend Connect. Now we read all about MySpace’s “Data Availability” initiative – not to be confused with Data Portability – which allows MySpace members to share their public profile with websites of their choice.

Is this the year of the “User Identity Battle”?

Responding to the growing success of Facebook.com, the social networking titan, MySpace.com has retaliated with an announcement that they will be unleashing the MySpace Developer Platform.

The platform, which is slated to be released as a test next week, will allow developers to integrate games, media-sharing features and other programs with the site - not unlike the way developers have been able to share their programs via Facebook.

Just when you thought every possible niche had been served, Kansas-based Waxx Inc. unleashes Skywax.com on an unsuspecting world. The service offers free web design and management of the web construction process from start to finish, but only for bands, djs, and other musicians.

For “legit” print journalists, the day of reckoning may be approaching more quickly than any of us would like. A survey by web CMS vendor Polopoly reports that, according to European newspaper execs, 40 percent of published content will be user generated.

In the next three years.

Because of this, blogs and other “new media” commodities will become increasingly critical to the news-making populace. And with this trend, personalized online advertising opportunities are also expected to improve.

When Facebook opened its back-end to outside applications in early spring, it gave users the power to act on preferences for how they’d like to interact with others.

Suddenly, you didn’t have to wait until Facebook felt like offering you a functionality; you could just code one up yourself and disseminate it.

Though it’s been around since 2002, contact management and social networking site Plaxo was seemingly lost in the shuffle as competitors like MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn have risen to prominence in recent history.

Not content to sit on the sidelines, Plaxo hopes that, by embracing OpenID for identity management and microformats for information exchange, they can catch up to peers currently dominating the social networking landscape.