Pay Per Click Advertising and SEOmyspace - Pay Per Click Advertising and SEO

Microsoft Outlook sends MySpace a friend request

James Oliver — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:39:30 +0000

It is quite rare these days to find an internet user that frequents both the Microsoft Outlook e-mail program and the often forgotten spawn of social networking that is MySpace. The former is often used by people with a lot of e-mail accounts usually for work and the later by teenagers hoping to get their attempt at a chart topper heard.

Nevertheless it has been announced this week that Microsoft and MySpace have created a beta version of a tool that will allow users of their Outlook program to see their MySpace connections and friends within the e-mail client.

Microsoft will be adding an all new ‘social connector’ feature within Outlook that will allow users to connect to a social network of their choosing which will include MySpace, the lesser known Linkedln and inevitably Facebook, which will be added soon. This will work with all versions of Outlook from this decade; 2003, 2007 and the new 2010 edition.

The service will allow Outlook users to view their friends and colleagues in the ‘people pane’, they will also be able to view activity or ‘status’ updates, sync contact lists with Outlook and have one click access to their friends profiles.

Just how popular this will be remains to be seen, but what has become evident is the fact that the big players on the internet have recognized the pull and demand for social networking. It is looking as though constant connection to ones social network is becoming a staple whether being on a computer or a phone, but is that what we really want? It would seem that is what we’re going to get whether we like it or not.

Photobucket valued at a mere $60 Million

James Oliver — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:26:44 +0000

As you may have heard, if you’ve been paying attention, MySpace/News Corp are currently in the process of trying to sell Photobucket, the video and image sharing service it acquired for $250 million dollars with an additional $50 million earnout in 2007. The buyer is a company called Ontela, who come with 40 million backing from Disney’s Steamboat Ventures arm. The deal with Ontela is thought to be at an advanced stage though sources close to both companies are putting the valuation at around $60 million, an 83% reduction from what MySpace paid.

If reports of the valuation are correct, then it’s one hell of an embarrassment for MySpace and its backer News Corp to have gotten a valuation so catastrophically wrong.

This kind of publicity is the last thing that MySpace needed. The social network is increasingly seen as losing out to the simpler more user friendly Facebook and the sheer publicity of Twitter, with many claiming that the only real USP it currently retains is customisability and some cache within the music business.

For the time being Ontela are not currently commenting on the story. Nor, unsurprisingly, are MySpace.

MySpace plans to launch Email Service

Jenny Sanderson — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:20:00 +0000

By the end of the year many MySpace users will have their very own ‘@myspace.com’ email address. The launch, scheduled for late 2009, will be low key and initially limited only to the USA. The scheme is intended to be rolled out to the rest of the world, though a plan for this is yet to be drafted. Sources within the popular social networking site have called the email plan the ‘logical extension’ of the brand and its existing ‘instant messaging tool.’

It’s being seen by some as a direct response to Facebook’s recent vanity URL development, which has allowed users to pick their own URLs. This new policy has proved incredibly popular, particularly with companies as it allows them to put a manageable and, more importantly, memorable url on a business card, poster etc.

Time will tell whether the MySpace URL will have a similar effect though, for me, the prospects for anything that increases the reliance of a social network’s user base can only be good.

US rise in Social Network use

Matt Thomas — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:09:03 +0000

With so much of the world now poking, tagging and micro blogging their way across the social networking landscape, you’d be forgiven for thinking that social networking didn’t have much room to grow. Well, apparently not. According to Nielsen Online, the amount of time the USA spends on social networking sites has risen by a whopping 83 per cent over the last year.

It’ll come as a surprise to no one that the bulk of that time was spent on Facebook. The resounding market leader was responsible for using up 13.9 billion minutes of American time over the past twelve months. However the real shock is just how much Facebook use has proliferated, the site now has 700% more users than it did in April 2008.

However, Facebook’s growth looks positively anaemic when compared with Twitter, who can boast a 3,712% increase on last year. These stats should help Twitter shed the perception held by many that it is a platform that people tire of quickly.

Not doing so well is MySpace, which has seen a major drop off in usage, 31%, to be precise. This figure is made all the more bleak by the overall buoyancy of the market. In this case it seem s that a rising tide doesn’t quite lift all ships.

Government Monitoring of Facebook?

James Oliver — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:55:47 +0000

The government could be about to gain access to your Facebook account, that’s if new plans announced today are approved. The home office is proposing forcing some social networks to hold data on the movements of their members in an effort to disrupt the activities of criminals.

The plan is part of the government’s ‘Intercept Modernisation Programme,’ a programme aimed at retaining information on phone calls, Internet visits, emails, etc. that is set to cost the government several billion pounds.

The retention of online traffic was already covered by the European Union’s Data Retention Directive which suggests that ISPs store online communications and traffic for one year in case it is required by the authorities. However, it was claimed recently by MPs that this directive does not go far enough since the directive does not cover social networking sites like Bebo, Facebook and MySpace.

In this country around 25 million people use social networking sites, meaning that almost half of the population would be affected by any such plan. Civil liberties groups are outraged by the news, claiming that the plan will excessively pry into the private lives of millions of innocent Internet users

Facebook and Myspace more reliable than Competitors

Matt Thomas — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 10:50:29 +0000

Its official, in 2008, Myspace and Facebook suffered much less downtime than the other main social networking sites. That’s according to a report from Pingdom, an outfit which monitors websites around the world. The group studied 15 of the world’s more popular social networks for the entirety of 2008 and found significant differences in outages and down-time.

The best performing sites – those that remained fully operational 99.9% of the time or more – were Classmates.com, Xanga, Facebook, MySpace and Imeem. The most significant outage was suffered by Friendster, which was down for more than 23 hours over the course of three days due to an issue at the data centre, though a third of the sites surveyed suffered more than a day and a half of downtime over the year.

Somewhat surprisingly, the worst performer overall was micro-blogging site, twitter, which embarrassingly, suffered more downtime than any other social networking site in 2008. However, Pingdom did note that the site improved vastly towards the end of 2008, just in time to handle the massive influx of users it is currently enjoying.