MySpace plans to redesign its homepage, navigation, profile editing, search utility, and TV player. Starting this Wednesday, June 18, it will start launching the first of the redesigns. The social networking behemoth said the redesign will be global and is an attempt to widen its demographics and boost user engagement on the site. “This is more than a face-lift; we’re changing the way people interact with the site and with brands,” said a MySpace spokesman, adding that a major advertiser was signed for the U.S. MySpace home page on the first day of the relaunch.
MySpace has about 110 million More»

Labels: MySpace, social networks, usability 2.0, user experience

Yet another social network is shutting down. This time is it Verizon’s social network. The social network which let users write blogs, post photos, and discuss in forums, will close June 16, 2008. The existing social network on the Verizon website will be moved over to the Verizon page on Facebook. Verizon jumped into social networking like many other companies, thinking it would be easy. They even branded it as “Join The Conversation” however they soon realized that branded social network wasn’t worth the effort and they are moving to where the conversation is.
In January, Conde More»

Labels: Facebook, MySpace, Online Advertising, social networks

Glam is a publishing and advertising network that, according to VentureBeat, reaches some 64 million people. The Glam demographic is mostly women and skews to higher incomes, making the Glam audience potenially lucrative for advertisers. Glam’s plans to become something of a celebrity watching social network appear to be shifting to what they see as a more lucrative network of blogs and publishing from other sites as well as the Glam network.
To succeed in the video space Glam has a lot of work ahead, and it won’t be glamorous. Video advertising remains More»

Labels: blam, Facebook, MySpace

Revolutionary activity may be needed in the social networking space soon to help make sure that all the key players make sure social networking standards continue to become more open, more transparent, and always *user centric*.

Dan Farber noted in an excellent post today:
It’s time for the social networks, like the 13 colonies in 1774banding together to be free of British authority, to unite and manifest that theWeb is by and for the users.

I say … Huzzah! It’s imperative that individual users and the More»

Labels: Facebook, MySpace, open social, social networks

There is a lot of concern in the online and offline community about the recent court decision to hold a woman accountable for the suicide death of a teenager after the woman used Myspace to mentally harass the teen.
The woman’s daughter had been friends with the girl but after the two girls had a falling out the mom opened a myspace account and spoofed a teen boy identity for herself. She then befriended and later rejected the teen who, already suffering from depression, killed herself.
As with many other high More»

Labels: legal, MySpace, Social Networking

Facebook is announcing a stronger information sharing feature called “Facebook Connect“:
Facebook Connect is the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allowsusers to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site.This will now enable third party websites to implement and offer even morefeatures of Facebook Platform off of Facebook – similar to featuresavailable to third party applications today on Facebook.

Facebook lists Trusted authentication, Real identity, Friends Access, and Dynamic Privacy as key features of the new platform. Here are more details at the developer blog.
Although open is very More»

Labels: Facebook, MySpace

MySpace will be supporting very open data portability standards which will make it easy to share information across different websites with a single login as well as other excellent features. This is separate from the Open Social initiative which will also be supported by Myspace but represents the same type of open, data sharing approach that is becoming a key component of “best practices” for online development and interaction.
Ben Metcalfe is a key player in all this and will certainly be a great steward of the project. He’s a very More»

Labels: ben metcalfe, data portability, MySpace

As social applications like Facebook, Myspace, Ning, and dozens of others attain sky high valuations few are focusing much attention on how poorly most of these social networking sites monetize their enormous traffic levels.
Microsoft’s Emerging Business guru Don Dodge, in an excellent post about Social Networking, notes an example where a Facebook application only manages to generate $6,000 to $15,000 per month revenue with page views of …. wait for it …. three hundred million per month. This disparity is so great I’m wondering a bit about his source for those numbers, but it is certainly More»

Labels: Facebook, facebook revenues, MySpace, Search, Social Networking

While US social networks are waiting on advertisers to shifting their ad spending their way. Tencent, a Chinese internet portal which operates QQ.com is not banking on advertising. The company reported revenues of $523 million and an operating profit of $224 million. About 60% of the revenue came from services like games, virtual currency called QQ coin (which is fake currency paid for with real money), an additional 21% came from mobile services like ringtones and only 13% came from online advertising. QQ.com is reported to have More»

Labels: AOL, Facebook, MySpace, Online Advertising, online services, social networks

A new social networking alliance will include internet powerhouses Google, Yahoo, and Myspace in an “Open Social Foundation“. Facebook’s absence from this list is something of a social networking elephant in the room as Facebook is generally considered the key innovator and eventual market leader in the social networking space.
The Open Social Foundation will, according to the Yahoo Press release today, work to ensure:
… the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web…The foundation will provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, More»

Labels: Facebook, MySpace, open social, Yahoo