To battle back against Facebook, MySpace tunes into more online music

MySpace, the once and would-be king of social media, is increasingly turning

Van Natta's MySpace is doubling down on music. Photo: MySpace

toward music to combat a dominant Facebook, and keep its 125 million users coming back.

On Wednesday in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 Summit, MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta announced the launch of two new music products for the online site – one for the fans, the other for the bands. More

Less than six months into his new role as head of News Corp. (NWSA), digital chief Jon Miller has no acquisitions planned. Instead, he said Thursday, he’s going to seed innovation from inside the company and spoke of “putting the house in order” first.

While he didn’t comment on News Corp.’s rumored plans to release a kindle-like digital device (News Corp. has denied that it will) he also talked at length about coming platform shifts and how industries will be experimenting with business models into the fall and figuring out how to adapt them. More

A brief history of social technology, and what it means to you

By Gina Bianchini, CEO and co-founder, Ning

Ning's Bianchini says social networks are evolving

At the outset of online social networking, around, say, 2002, early users had to wedge their personalities into static, cookie-cutter profile pages — it was the price we all paid for the convenience of this new and powerful social tool.  How times have changed: Instead of altering yourself to fit the social network, the social network is evolving to cater to you. Here's a quick look at how companies and technologies have evolved to more closely mirror the human experience.

Social Networking Infancy – The Early Days

Social technology ties people together in new ways. It makes it easy to meet or reconnect with people, discover and share ideas and content, and consume news and events across the Internet. Friendship takes on an entirely new dimension online, and media consumption and sharing –photos, music, and most of all video –are changing and rates never before seen on the Internet. It is a revolution that spawns companies like MySpace, YouTube, Photobucket, and even Facebook. More

On the San Francisco Bay Area's local NBC station, Jon Fortt and Sarah Lacy talk to Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster about controversies surrounding the company. This episode of Press:Here airs on Sunday, 3/22. Part 1 of 4. (EBAY) (YHOO) (GOOG) (MNI) (GCI) (NWS) (MSFT) (AAPL)

How do these rumors get started? Or, more to the point, how do they get perpetuated?

Late Thursday, a site called tinycomb ("Hand-Picked Tech News") reported that Facebook had been banned "for life" from every Apple (AAPL) store in the United States — some 207 retail outlets in all, by my count.

This must have been one of those facts that was too good to check, because I'm pretty sure none of the half-dozen newspapers and blogs that repeated and embellished the story bothered to do any legwork to confirm it.

It certainly seems that most of the readers who applauded the reported ban — a couple dozen at tinycomb, nearly 40 at Digg, more than 120 at MacRumors — took it as fact.

"Why has this been kept under the radar?" asked SherwinNero at tinycomb.

"Has it really been kept under the radar," answered Max, "or was it considered 'not significant enough' to put it on the front pages everywhere?"

Or is, just possibly, not true?

I know from experience that some Apple stores put limits on where on the Web you can take their demo machines — sometimes restricting Safari to Apple's promotional pages.

And it's certainly possible that individual stores have blocked Facebook — as MySpace has been blocked since May 2007 — because some of its members were hogging the machines.

Indeed, Ars Technica quotes an unnamed Apple employee who says his store has been blocking Facebook for about a month.

"It's just trying to find a balance between letting people try out the computers, but not tying them up so others can try them as well," he told Ars. (link)

But a person at Apple headquarters  in a position to know assures me that there is no nationwide ban on Facebook in effect — permanent or otherwise.

I'm headed to the nearest Apple store to check it out. If you're in one now, let us know in the comment stream where you are and whether the demo machine you're using will let you get to your Facebook page.

UPDATE: CNET's Caroline McCarthy beat me to it, did the legwork, and confirmed that Facebook is accessible at all three Manhattan Apple Stores, although as suspected there are individual machines in those stores that will redirect you to an Apple Store page. See here.

News Corp. is in talks with Yahoo about a possible combination. But is the deal real, or just a game?

Does News Corp. really want a piece of Yahoo?

Word leaked out Wednesday that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (NWS) is looking at taking a stake of 20 percent or more in Yahoo in exchange for MySpace, some cash and other online properties. An infusion from News Corp., the reasoning goes, could boost Yahoo’s stock price high enough to outstrip Microsoft’s (MSFT) hostile takeover attempt.

This is probably as close as Yahoo (YHOO) will get to a white knight scenario where someone saves the company from the clutches of Microsoft. But a News Corp. deal probably won’t happen.

Why? More

Despite the easy availability of pirated music, most U.S. kids in the 9-to-14-year-old "tween" bracket are now paying for at least some of their music downloads.

That's the key finding of "Kids & Digital Content," a survey issued Wednesday by the NPD Group. According to NPD, 70% of U.S. tweens download digital music in an average month. Among them, nearly half (49%) used Apple's (AAPL) iTunes to get their songs and 16% used MySpace (NWS).

However, the second most popular source of digital music, used by more than a quarter (26%) of the group, was the peer-to-peer file-sharing service Limewire.

"The recording industry has focused on high-profile litigation programs as a deterrent, and education initiatives to communicate alternatives to illegal music file sharing," said NPD vice president Russ Crupnick. "Findings in this report suggest that the industry can still do more to promote specific ways children can obtain digital music legally, through pre-paid accounts and gift cards."

Of course, all this assumes that the 3,376 kids who sent in completed surveys told the NPD the truth, not what they thought the survey group wanted to hear.

Facebook's unique audience grew by 1.5 million people in October, according to a report released this week by Nielsen Online. That's five times the rate of larger rival MySpace, which grew by about 300,000.

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Are you confused by Google's (GOOG) OpenSocial strategy to take on Facebook?

It's OK. OpenSocial is a bit abstract, which makes it difficult to grasp. Yes, it's clear that important tech players like Oracle (ORCL) and Salesforce.com (CRM) have lined up behind the Google plan, but lots of people are asking themselves, how will it work? What will it allow people to do that they couldn't do before? Will it be a blow to Facebook, the hot Silicon Valley startup that just scored a $240 million cash infusion from Microsoft (MSFT)?

Below is a video from social networking startup Ning, another participant in Google's plan. The video explains OpenSocial in the clearest terms I've seen.

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Hulu.com, which launched in private beta today, emulates many features popularized by Google's (GOOG) YouTube. But unlike YouTube, which mostly shows user-generated content, Hulu includes programs from networks, including NBC, Fox, E! Entertainment, FUEL TV, SciFi Network and USA Networks. The site's purpose is to be both a promotional vehicle and a revenue generator; it will make money from ads both on the site and within videos.

Click below to see a clip from Hulu, the online video joint venture between NBC Universal (GE) and News Corp. (NWS). (The clip will expire after about five weeks.)

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