Items tagged with MySpace
Cloud storage may be young in the consumer world, but it's growing up fast. With online data being handed out left and right, used to store everything from multimedia to documents, it seems that even carriers are getting in the game. Now, AT&T has launched a new cloud-based photo and video sharing app for iOS customers. Users will get 5GB of storage for free, and they'll have the ability to upload images and video to secure online storage and quickly share on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or e-mail. Users can create and customize albums for photos and video on the device or online from a laptop or home computer. Customers can also store music and other files in their AT&T Locker storage....
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The sexiest social network on the block right now has got to be Google+, and you probably spent the last several days either trying to secure an invite, or tossing friends and family into Circles. Facebook is still the most popular social hangout, and MySpace recently made headlines for changing hands for a much lower price than News Corp. originally paid for it. But why isn't anyone talking about LinkedIn? Perhaps they should be. According to new data from comScore, LinkedIn had 33.9 million unique U.S. visitors in June, an increase of around 500,000 from one month prior. That was enough for LinkedIn to leapfrog MySpace and become the second most popular social hangout on the Web in the U.S....
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After years of attempting to variously reinvent, reorganize, and recapture the market space it's been losing to Facebook, MySpace is out the door. This isn't a surprise—News Corp declared it was ready to sell the segment last February. Now the social networking site is actually on the chopping block. News Corp is quite profitable, but the changes facing certain markets, particularly print, has likely contributed to the MySpace spinoff. Several venture capital firms are expected to bid on the company, including Redscout Ventures, Thomas H. Lee Partners, and Criterion Capital Partners LLC. News Corp reportedly wants at least $100 million for it, having paid $580 million for the website in...
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Let's face it, all the cool kids are using Facebook these days. Heck, with over 500 million members, even the uncool kids are using Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg's baby is exactly what MySpace wanted to be, at least in terms of numbers, and at this point it's tough to see MySpace sticking around for too much longer. Here's the thing. MySpace has put a lot of effort into reinventing itself through its streaming music service, but it doesn't appear people are buying it. According to the U.K.'s Telegraph, MySpace lost 10 million unique users between January and February 2011, going from 73 million to 63 million in just four weeks. That's not how you want to start the year off. The social networking...
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After reports surfaced that News Corp. is considering selling Myspace, a News Corp. spokeswoman has confirmed that the company is exploring “strategic options” for Myspace. News Corp. purchased Myspace in 2005 for $580 million. Since then, the social networking site has struggled in comparison to its competitor, Facebook. Reports that News Corp. was looking into options for Myspace surfaced after the social network cut 500 employees, which is nearly 50 percent of its staff. The Wall Street Journal, also owned by News Corp., reported the Mike Jones, chief executive of Myspace, had told employees in a companywide meeting on Wednesday that News Corp. was exploring a sale, merger, or...
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For the first time, Facebook has surpassed Google to become the most visited website in the U.S. for the majority of 2010. According to online measurement service Experian Hitwise, Facebook topped Google with 8.9 percent of all U.S. visits between January and November 2010. Google came in a close second with 7.2 percent of all visits. In 2008 and 2009, Google.com dominated the top spot as the most visited website. In 2007, MySpace, another social networking website, enjoyed the top spot. MySpace is currently ranked No. 7. Facebook's move to become the most visited site in the U.S. shows just how much the site has gained in popularity. In just six years, Facebook has become the world's largest...
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Yesterday, Nov. 17 was National Unfriend Day (NUD). The brainchild of Jimmy Kimmel, the day is supposed to a day when you unfriend the faux friends you have on Facebook (or any other social networking site). Kimmel gave us some guidelines to use to determine who to unfriend on National Unfriend Day. They were: If you wouldn’t loan someone 50 dollars, unfriend them. If you wouldn’t invite them to your birthday party, unfriend them. If you wouldn’t cry if they got hit by a bus, unfriend them. How many faux friends have you unfriended today? Or instead, would you rather have more faux friends? Watch a pair of videos from Jimmy Kimmel's show on NUD, including both Dr. Mehmet Oz,...
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Have you ever been approached by some higher-up at work to be their "Friend" on Facebook? If so, you might have accepted their Friend request out of respect / fear. Jimmy Kimmel has called for a National Unfriend Day (NUD) to get rid of these faux friends. Jimmy Kimmel used the Wednesday’s episode of his "Jimmy Kimmel Live" show to declare November 17, 2010 National UnFriend Day. He hopes the new "holiday" will unite Facebook users in a move to unfriend those social networking contacts they have that aren’t real friends. Naturally this could extend to any other social networking service, as well. Here's what his site says: Jimmy Kimmel has declared a new holiday on November 17th -...
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It seems we can't go a month without talking about privacy concerns surrounding one of today's popular social networking sites. Whether it's a new Facebook setting or other security breach, keeping one's private information private isn't always easy. A recent poll by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion claims that half of all US residents who use a social-networking site are concerned about privacy. Of this group, close to half describe themselves as very concerned. As one might expect, fears concerning privacy increased as the age of survey respondents went up: only 43 percent of respondents between 18 and 29 said they were concerned compared to 63 percent of those over 60. In terms of gender,...
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Google has announced a new service, which is being rolled out slowly, as is typical of cloud-based services. It is called OneBox, and what it aims to do, in concert with Google's music search partners MySpace (and its recently acquired iLike subsidiary) and Lala, is allow users to play limited previews and full songs in their search results. Besides iLike and Lala, OneBox results will include Pandora, Imeem, and Rhapsody when available. What you might notice is missing are results from iTunes and Amazon MP3. From their partners, it seems like Google was looking mostly for cloud-based streaming music services, although one could also guess that the omission of iTunes (and maybe Amazon MP3) is...
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Gaydar is a term frequently used in sitcoms (and perhaps among male friends) to denote the ability to pick out homosexuals at a glance. Silly as that may be, two MIT students, while working on a term project for an ethics and law project, appear to have stumbled onto a working form, by leveraging data gleaned from social networking sites. This is actually a serious issue, as it just emphasizes further the need to be careful on social networking sites. The students, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree, dubbed the 2007 project "Gaydar." They took information from Facebook involving friends a user might have on the site, and with software made used statistical analysis to make predictions based on...
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Remember the days when MySpace was THE social networking site of choice, and Facebook trailed badly? Those days are long gone, and in fact, Facebook announced on Tuesday that they have topped 300 million users. The announcement, much like what Apple has shown with similar stats for the App Store, shows that growth for Facebook is growing at a rapidly increasing rate. Facebook grew from 200 million users to 300 million in just over 5 months. It took 8 months to go from 100 million from 200 million. The initial leap to 100 million took years. Additionally, Facebook said they are already cash-flow positive. In April they told analysts and the press that know that the company expected to be "operationally...
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Touted as “the first phone with social skills,” Motorola's new CLIQ smartphone is the company’s first Android handset. The CLIQ is headed to T-Mobile in the fourth quarter, so it should be here in time for the holidays. The CLIQ will utilize MOTOBLUR, which was also announced today. MOTOBLUR is designed to sync contacts, posts, messages, photos, and much more from sources such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Gmail, work and personal e-mail, and LastFM and automatically deliver it to the home screen. Recognizing this is a lot of content, Motorola has organized this information into easy-to-manage streams that are designed to help you spend less time managing your life and more time living it. The...
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In an attempt to arrest MySpace's ever-faster decline into irrelevance, News Corp. is transforming the social network into an online gaming destination.The company, owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, had to do something, after all, once MySpace lost major ground to Facebook in June, posting smaller U.S. numbers than the latter — Comscore reported MySpace had 68 million compared with Facebook's 74 million uniques (just from the U.S. Internet audience, the gap is even wider when looking at worldwide figures).News Corp owns the Fox empire — the cable news network and the film and television studio — but hasn't entered into the video gaming industry. News Corp digital chief Jonathan Miller said...
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Twitter is huge. Facebook is enormous. MySpace is still a serious powerhouse. The bottom line? Social networks are a force to be reckoned with, and Americans are spending lots and lots of time on them. In a new study released this week, Nielsen reveled that United States citizens are spending more time than over on these sites. In fact, it found that the number of minutes that Americans spent on these sites doubled (doubled!) in the past year. Crazier still, Nielsen Online discovered that "the number of minutes Americans spent on social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Tagged, Twitter and LinkedIn grew 83 percent from April 2008 to April of this year." Year-over-year, Facebook has...
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It's not as though the Internet is totally open in China, and in fact many users don't realize what they are missing, just that they can't reach certain sites. However, as the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, or what China likes to refer to as the June Fourth Incident, approaches, China has pumped up its censorship of the Web. According to multiple media sources, China has blocked Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, and other sites, starting on Monday. According to the Associated Press, China has been blocking college and university-affiliated websites, as well as media sharing sites. Authorities targeted message boards on more than 6,000 Web sites affiliated with colleges and universities,...
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The Pope has embraced social networking. No, you can't poke him or send him a private message, but the Vatican has indeed launched a Facebook page for the Pope as well as a Facebook application called "The Pope meets you on Facebook" which will allow users to "receive the messages of Pope Benedict XVI through the most important social network of the world" (MySpace, you've been dissed). It's an interesting move, because earlier this year, Pope Benedict XVI warned against the dangers of possibly becoming addicted to technology, specifically social networking. His warning then was: "It would be sad if our desire to sustain and develop online friendships were to be at the cost of our availability...
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Social networking site MySpace hopes to attract Internet users with a new reality TV-style show called Married on MySpace. The show will chronicle one couple’s journey to their wedding day. MySpace members will drive much of the decision-making in the planning event. The process begins with users voting on videos submitted by couples to determine who should be featured. After a couple has been chosen, MySpace users vote on other aspects of the special day, such as selecting what the couple will wear, the location of the bachelor and bachelorette parties, and even the wedding location. (If you think the concept sounds a bit familiar, NBC’s “Today” show has hosted an annual wedding contest for...
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The Internet is a wondrous thing, but it's also made teasing and bullying, formerly restricted to schoolyards, something you can do online for all the world to see. A Long Island teenager is suing her tormentors, their parents, and Facebook over a Facebook group "calculated to hold the plaintiff up to public hatred, ridicule and disgrace." Denise Finkel, 18 and now a student at the University of Albany, filed suit in Manhattan for $3 million. Finkel alleges that four former Oceanside High School classmates (Michael Dauber, Jeffrey Schwartz, Leah Herz and Melinda Danowitz) created the password-protected Facebook group "90 Cents Short Of A Dollar" to bully her. In her complaint, Finkel claims that...
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So as not to give companies more excuses to kick employees to the curb in this tough economy, we've warned before about watching what you post to your social networking site. After all, MySpace photos have gotten an Oregon mayor recalled, and now a Facebook post about how boring her job was has gotten Kimberley Swann of Clacton on Sea in England fired from her job at Ivell Marketing and Logistics Limited. Kimberley Swann, 16, came home one day and typical of a 16-year-old, posted what she later called a "throw-away comment" on Facebook. Thing is, while that's what she told the BBC, there was more than one update on Facebook about how boring her job was: first day at work. omg!! So dull!!all i...
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Facebook's Terms of Service (TOS) changed a couple of weeks ago, but wasn't noticed until brought to people's attention by the site Consumerist. Despite some fast tap-dancing by Facebook, the cat's out of the bag, and it's not going back in. In fact, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is preparing a formal complaint to be sent to the FTC. EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg said: "We think that Facebook should go back to its original terms of service"Facebook made changes to their TOS which seemed to imply they owned you information in perpetuity. While denying it in a blog post and explaining it in a way that made sense:One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether...
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Another big name is about to enter the webmail market and would be the third-largest provider the day it launches, TechCrunch reported today, citing unnamed sources.All the reason it would be so big upon launch is because all MySpace users would be assigned an e-mail address of [username]@myspace.com. The social networking site has about 125 million active users (those who check in at least once a month), which would place it above Gmail and below Yahoo and Hotmail/Windows Live (a ComScore report from about a year ago showed Yahoo the big heavy with nearly 257 million users, Microsoft just short of 255 million and Gmail at 90 million worldwide, though those numbers are sure to have changed somewhat...
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