MySpace

MySpace has been sold by News Corp for $35 million to an advertising company Specific Media along with the singer Justin Timberlake. It is just a fraction of what News Corp paid for the social networking giant in 2005. At that time MySpace was purchased for $580 million.

Specific Media which deals with digital advertising did not unveil financial details of the deal. The company said that Timberlake would take an ownership stake and serve a "major role" in developing a strategy for Myspace.

According to some sources News Corp was talking to Vevo.com about giving control of MySpace to the music label-owned video site, but the likeliness of a deal remains uncertain.

The unnamed sources say that talking to Vevo.com, News Corp planned to exchange Myspace for a stake in a new venture. Earlier, representatives for News Corp contacted Vevo to see if they would be interested in purchasing all of Myspace but they received a negative response.

Since then, a joint venture has been proposed which could see News Corp spin off its stake into some sort of joint venture.

OpenDNS, a provider of DNS-based security and infrastructure services, has recently published a new report that revealed that social media websites like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube were treated reversely by corporations and people responsible for networks. These websites appeared both in "top blacklisted" and "top whitelisted" lists compiled for 2010.

Social networking company MySpace is laying off almost half of its workforce in a move to restructure the business before it can be sold. The restructuring affects 47% of the staff or 500 employees and comes some weeks after speculations appeared in the media.

According to the source close to News Corp the media giant is not involved in sales talks. Still, mounting losses of MySpace should contribute to the decision to sell it to private equity companies or Yahoo-likes.

Late Wednesday media sources on the Internet reported that Facebook and MySpace are going to make a joint announcement Thursday afternoon and it remains to be seen what the statement will be all about.

Media outlets reported that Facebook and MySpace have sent out invitations to a joint announcement Webcast to take place Thursday, November 18 at 12PM Pacific time. The invitation specifies that MySpace CEO Mike Jones and Facebook Vice President of Partnerships and Platform Marketing Dan Rose will be on hand to announce something.

A number of websites including MTV, ESPN, MySpace, Hulu, ABC, NBC and Scribd are being sued in federal court on the allegations they violated federal computer intrusion law by secretly using storage in Adobe’s Flash player to re-create cookies deleted by users. The lawsuit which is seeking the status of a class action was filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

News Corp is holding negotiations with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo over signing a new search advertising agreement for its social networking website MySpace. At the moment MySpace has a deal with Google which is expiring next month. The company made a $900 million four year deal in 2006, now it is looking to sign the kind of agreement but for "significantly less money," according to the Wall Street Journal.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has started the company targeting to defend social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace, from kids pornography

Cuomo has thus created a database aimed at keeping child pornography off of social networking platform. The database holds digital signatures of more than 8,000 child pornography images.

The Online Publishers Association published the results of its research into how brands are perceived across content in various online environments. The study looked at how environments like media publications (such as ESPN.com, iVillage, NYTimes.com, Wall Street Journal, etc.), portal channels (such as AOL News, MSN Money, Yahoo Sports, etc.), and social networks (Facebook, MySpace, etc.) influence content and advertisers.

According to the Wall Street Journal last report, Facebook has been providing advertisers with the data they can use to discover users' names and locations, despite terms of its privacy policy.

MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites are being increasingly used by the US agents to find and seize users under investigation for breaking the law. According to a report by the US Justice Department agents do this by infiltrating fake profiles on these social media resources.

Microsoft is widening its users’ services choice by adding social networking services, including LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace, to Outlook.  So company’s users got an ability to check social networking information in their inbox.

Facebook, with 350 million users overall, is the premier destination for marketers in the U.S. and many worldwide markets. It will surpass its former rival, MySpace, in ad revenue in 2010, per eMarketer.
In total, marketers will spend $2.2 billion to advertise on social networks worldwide in 2009, with $1.2 billion in spending in the U.S. In 2010, Facebook will account for nearly one-quarter of all social network ad spending worldwide, up from 20 percent in 2009.

2009 will end with major shifts in social network advertising spending. Facebook, at 350 million users worldwide, is the premier destination for marketers in the US and many worldwide markets. It will surpass its former rival, MySpace, in ad revenues in 2010, when marketers worldwide will spend $605 million on Facebook versus $385 million on MySpace.

On Monday the cyber space was struck with the reports that 32 million user accounts at the popular social networking site RockYou had been hacked. The situation is worsened by the fact that RockYou are storing all user account data in plain text in their database, exposing all that information to attackers. RockYou have yet to inform users of the breach.