Why isn’t Facebook a founding member of the OpenSocial Foundation, along with Google, Yahoo, and MySpace? Because Facebook is threatened by OpenSocial’s ultimate aim of connecting user profiles and enabling users to easily manage and port their data across any social network.
Facebook is worried that this will enable groups of friends to easily pick up [...]

As speculation and chatter increases, the question of whether Google ends up buying Facebook is turning out to be one of the big questions of 2007. My bet is that there is already an offer on the table, and that Facebook is seriously considering it. I’m also willing to bet that Facebook will [...]

By Robert Young
Late last week, the Financial Times reported that MySpace was likely to respond to Facebook’s much-hyped F8 Platform initiative with its own third-party application/widget development program. Last week also brought forth an interesting debate, initiated by Jason Kottke via his aptly titled post “Facebook is the new AOL”, questioning whether the [...]

And you thought “user-generated content” was flooding the web with more “stuff” than human or algorithm could possibly process. Well, get ready for the next “wave,” drawn from the endless ocean of content sitting in archive vaults, waiting to be poured on the web as the marginal cost of doing so shrinks daily. Think every [...]

Last spring I wrote a post “Has The MySpace Downturn Begun?” Dan Mitchell at NYT picked it up in a piece “MySpace No Longer Their Space?” My post was purely speculative and, not surprisingly, completely wrong. But the fact remains that MySpace belongs to News Corp, not MySpace users, which is why News Corp can [...]

The once monolithic media industry is undergoing a radical schism, dividing itself into content creation, on the one hand, and content aggregation and distribution on the other.
The nature of this transformation suddenly crystallized for me when I read Tom Foremski’s piece on the new West Coast/East Coast media industry divide. Tom seems to be focused [...]

One sales executive apparently sees more opportunity selling ads for PayPerPost, whose no-disclosure-required policy was just declared a big No-No by the FTC, than selling ads for MySpace (via PayPerPost blog):
Randy Mountz, former vice president of sales for MySpace.com’s Midwest region, has joined PayPerPost as the company’s vice president of sales, a new position.
Also [...]

The widely-used and much reviled term “user-generated content” implies that somebody is making something. But the dirty little secret of “user-generated” sites like YouTube and MySpace is that much of the content is not made by the users themselves — it’s appropriated from someone else.
So while everyone was watching Google engage in “frantic” negotiations [...]

I wondered about a MySpace downturn back in May — I may well have been just flat wrong — or maybe I was just premature. An article in the WSJ looks at the problem of MySpace and Facebook becoming overcrowded and too full of commercial messages:
“good bye myspace.
I’ve always hated you.
I just never had what [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot about media brands and whether they still matter in the new media landscape. The more I think about, the more it seems that brands are the only thing that still matters in media. What’s changed is not the importance or the role of media brands, but rather what defines a [...]

Numerous “analysts” (including me) have been predicting that user-generated content sites like MySpace and YouTube, despite their runaway popularity, will not receive all (or even much) of the big brand ad dollars that will be poured into online advertising across the next few years. The reason — advertisers still care about the quality of the [...]

I thought it was some kind of late summer April Fool’s joke — MySpace is looking into starting a print magazine. That’s right, a PRINT magazine. Other commentators have already made the obligatory comparisons to bubble era magazines from Yahoo, Ebay, and infamously from Pets.com, and they’ve observed how increasingly Old Media MySpace’s strategy seems [...]

Flush with confidence after closing a $900 million deal with Google, MySpace is taking on its next challenge — convincing advertisers who have put up brand and product pages on MySpace for free that they should pay for “their space” instead:
Now, advertisers say the company is stepping up its efforts to convince big clients using [...]

Om Malik took an interesting critical look at the Google deal with News Corp, which got me thinking about whether MySpace matters much at all to this deal, despite all the hype:
In a conference call, FIM executives noted that a very large number of people leave MySpace to go to Google. According to data collected [...]

The Guardian observes (via Jeff Jarvis) that YouTube has overtaken MySpace — but here’s the thing — it’s not really YouTube vs. MySpace. It’s user content and community hosted by YouTube vs. user content and community hosted by MySpace. The hosting is besides the point. It’s people like Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz who are [...]

Great technology brands — Google (search), Prius, iPod, — have one thing in common: they always work. Sometimes in the quest for best features, snazziest design, lowest price, biggest buzz, etc., technology companies lose sight of one of the most important — if not the most important — driver of customer loyalty: reliability.
Anyone who attempted [...]

I’ve been predicting for a while that companies would find ways to leverage the community marketing power of social networking sites like MySpace without the network seeing any financial benefit. Here’s a perfect example (via The Economist):
MySpace seems to offer a chance for companies to take their marketing into new, potentially more lucrative territory, by [...]

I’ve been following an interesting trend of power grabs by Web 2.0 companies, from MySpace to YouTube to Google — Web 2.0 is supposed to be all about the “user,” but when it comes to profit making the user is getting shut out:
MySpace
Musicians don’t get paid for music played on MySpace (via Umair):
The most popular [...]

I’ve been critical of AdSense of late, but let’s give credit where credit is due — AdSense, i.e. a distributed, shared-revenue advertising platform, represents the new paradigm for monetizing content. That’s why I remain skeptical that MySpace, despite being the current center of gravity for social media and despite its current off-the-charts traffic growth, will [...]

According to Hitwise, MySpace accelerated past Yahoo and Google…in terms of visits, that is.

No word yet on whether revenue growth has matched traffic growth. I’m on the edge of my seat to see the next News Corp quarterly earnings report. If the revenue curve matches the traffic curve, I’ll be the first to agree with [...]

Google is taking a lot of flack lately because it’s launched tons of apps but none has had even a fraction of the success of Google search. BusinessWeek gave Google a big kick in the head, as did Scoble, and many others.
So why hasn’t Google launched anything as successful as the original search? Because it’s [...]

In a desperate attempt to shelter advertisers from its community, MySpace is creating walled gardens where advertisers can feel like they are advertising on MySpace, even though they’re really not.
To publicize the contest, Disney built its own “page” on MySpace and bought an ad on MySpace’s front page. But it steered clear of the profile [...]

Remember MySpace the ticking time bomb? Well, it’s starting to tick faster — now they’re being sued for failing to protect children (thanks to Jeff for the tip):

A 14-year-old Travis County girl who said she was sexually assaulted by a Buda man she met on MySpace.com sued the popular social networking site Monday for $30 [...]

The launch of AOL/Netscape’s multi-channel Digg clone/killer came in the same week as news of new verticals in the soon-to-be-launched version 3 of Digg. As with vertical search, both Digg and its imitators see an opportunity to carve up the community-driven news category.
The same is true of the related memetracker category, with Gabe Rivera [...]

Superman has taken over MySpace’s homepage, in what was likely a lucrative deal for MySpace and a smart move for Warner Brothers — mostly.

WB is certainly capitalizing on MySpace’s prime homepage real estate, with an appropriately participatory marketing program that invites fans to upload their own superman pictures. And fans have indeed uploaded some fun [...]

TechCrunch has a summary of MySpace’s eye-popping page view and user numbers. MySpace is probably the most discussed online business alongside Google and Yahoo. But with Google and Yahoo, the talk revolves around BILLIONS of DOLLARS in highly profitable revenue. For MySpace the talk is never — even in News Corp’s earnings release — about [...]

I’ve held forth many times on the myriad threats facing MySpace, but the real threat to MySpace dominance is evident in the scores of aspiring MySpace killers that have been filling up my inbox with solicitations (given the publicity I’ve received as a MySpace skeptic). I thought I would take a refreshingly constructive approach to [...]

A generation is about to learn the hard way about the downside of posting your entire life online. An article in the Times shows the tip of the iceberg:
Many companies that recruit on college campuses have been using search engines like Google and Yahoo to conduct background checks on seniors looking for their first job. [...]

The “social” media revolution has everyone letting it all hang out all over the “open web,” so it should come as no surprise that the NSA is taking advantage of all this voluntary disclosure of personal information:
“I AM continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves.” So says Jon Callas, [...]

“We have a lot of work to do,” said Ross Levinsohn, President of Fox Interactive. Got that right. According to Levinsohn:
“The digital gold inside of MySpace wasn’t the number of users, but the information they’re providing, structured and unstructured data,” Levinsohn said–both demographic and psychographic data that Fox Interactive can use to suss out the [...]

Musician Billy Bragg has abandoned MySpace, a harsh reminder that MySpace doesn’t actually own ANY of its content, despite the backhanded efforts of News Corp’s legal department:

Bragg has deleted his tunes from his MySpace.com page, which offers this explanation: “SORRY THERE’S NO MUSIC,” because “once an artist posts up any content (including songs), it then [...]

Hi everyone! So this is this my first blog and my mom is going to kill me. She told me that she doesn’t want be to be like those myspace kids. So in an effort to let her sleep at night there’s no crazy stuff on this blog that could potentially [...]

Nick Carr emailed me Saturday morning with the news that Dan Mitchell’s NYT column had referenced my MySpace downturn post and that I had “dragged” Nick along with me. “One could make a career out of this MySpace skeptic thing,” I quipped back, “probably pays as much as a career in user-generated content.”
And then I [...]

Guy Kawasaki held a focus group with six teenagers — this is a small sample, of course, but their view of MySpace is telling:

Two panelists were MySpace users. The others expressed a certain backlash and purposeful resistance to the addiction of MySpace. One 14 year old used to be an active MySpace user but stopped [...]

Ah, the glories of “social” networking on MySpace:
And now there’s a new worry: a “phishing” scam that experts say could compromise teens’ — or their parents’ — financial information.
As with other phishing scams, in which con artists create realistic-looking Web sites using the names of well-known banks or other corporations, the MySpace scam tricks people [...]

So great is the hype surrounding MySpace that people are starting to hallucinate, seeing operating income where there are only registered users and page views. This is from a Motley Fool article on News Corp’s recent earnings release, which I cited in a previous post:
It bears noting that MySpace is only a small part of [...]

This year’s “Shoot Yourself In the Foot” award goes to News Corp’s Peter Chernin:
Chernin is a big believer in user-generated content. News Corp.’s MySpace is thriving. But he does not believe that there’s a vast backlog of great unmade TV shows and movies that cannot connect with audiences because of bottlenecks in distribution. To the [...]

Randall Stross, in a Times article, wonders who will pay for TV now that ad-skipping DVRs and on-demand broadband video have destroyed TV’s mass media advertising model. I wonder whether late 20th-century TV content production will follow the same path as early 20th-century transatlantic ocean travel, milk delivery, and buggy whip manufacturing — marginalized or [...]

It’s official — Microsoft is no longer a software company. With the launch of adCenter, Microsoft will be joining the ranks of Google and other media companies:
“Ad-supported software services are an integral part of Microsoft’s plans to give consumers access to a broader variety of digital media, whenever they want and on whatever device they [...]

Every media observer with a pulse continues to believe that News Corp’s acquisition of MySpace was the most brilliant M&A move of the digital age — and the view from the other side continues to be a lonely watch.
From “MySpace faces call to crackdown on predators“:

Massachusetts on Tuesday called on popular teen social networking Web [...]

The advent of web-based e-commerce fundamentally lowered the costs of doing business, increasing the scalability (and in many cases the viability) of thousands of small businesses. The introduction of micro-marketing through Google AdWords gave a huge jolt to this trend, making marketing scalable and profitable for these same small businesses. Two companies — Google and [...]

From The Onion (via David Utter at Web Pro News) — this is priceless:

From the ever-growing files that document MySpace’s downside risk, the latest from Wired, MySpace Faces a Perp Problem:
Wired News ran the names of randomly selected registered sex offenders in San Francisco and neighboring Sonoma County through MySpace’s user search engine, and turned up no fewer than five men whose self-reported names, photographs, ages, astrological signs, [...]

I’ll resist the temptation to say I told you so about big brand advertisers not wanting to take the risk of appearing next to questionable content on MySpace, other Web 2.0 sites, and ad networks (although I did tell you). Articles on this phenomenon are appearing more frequently, the latest from the Wall Street Journal:
Most [...]

Bill O’Reilly goes after MySpace with the leader “Pornographic Web?” — here’s his interview with MySpace apologist Danah Boyd.
Listen to Bill get the name of the site wrong in the opening. Here are some other quotes:
“Nobody really knows how old these kids are because they can’t check the IDs.”
“The problem is that these dopey kids [...]

A few weeks ago, I got hung out to dry for suggesting that “questionable” content residing on MySpace along with underage users would potentially harm News Corp’s business interests when advertisers refused to assume the risk. Today, we learn that MySpace agreed me, and suddenly it’s fashionable to talk about “questionable” content without being accused [...]

It’s happening again — the numbers just don’t make any sense. Facebook turns down $750 million, hoping to hype themselves up to $2 billion. And why? Well, just look at that CASH COW MySpace — it’s making…how much money? I’m on the edge of my seat for News Corp’s first 2006 earnings release, but “in [...]

Nick Carr did a thought-provoking psychoanlysis of my original MySpace post (the one that caused such a dust storm). He argues that I shouldn’t have shied away for the morality of the issue.
What’s most fascinating about Karp’s post, though, is not his reaction to MySpace but his reaction to his reaction to MySpace. Having [...]

The discussion about MySpace on tech.mememorandum this morning is dripping with irony. On the one hand, you have the MySpace apologists, arguing that what teenagers do on MySpace is no different from what teenagers of past generations have done to rebel and be different, and that parents should just teach their children well and not [...]

I’ve been dreading this post, but I can’t avoid saying this any longer — MySpace is a DEEPLY DISTURBING place. It’s so disturbing that I’m convinced that the vast majority of the Web 2.0 fan club who gush over MySpace has NEVER actually spent any time on MySpace.
I’m not the first to raise a [...]

Everyone in Old Media, and many in “New” Media (which isn’t as cutting-edge as it thinks it is), should fear the radically different media habits of the Digital Generation now coming of age. As Jon Fine points out:
Today’s teens are the first for whom self-created content competes with teen-aimed media like videogames. There are now [...]

There may or may not be a Web 2.0 crash coming, as Steve Rubel has predicted, but there’s certainly blood in the water, with Yahoo’s earnings miss, Gather.com’s bad reviews, the demise of SearchFox, and the gathering buzz about an impending crash. Steve thinks a key factor is that “online advertising isn’t growing as [...]

If Rupert Murdoch has it right, old media companies need to become more like Google and Yahoo, i.e. technology companies:
MySpace, a social-networking Web site, soon will add free video downloads, revamp its instant-messaging program and eventually offer Internet calling, Mr. Murdoch told a media-investor conference sponsored by Citigroup Inc.
Murdoch has certainly drunk the koolaid –the [...]