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For months, we've been fielding rumors (and filtering out the facts) about MySpace's proposed redesign and rebranding.

Tonight's report on TechCrunch outlines a few minor details of the overall plan to stop the site's hemorrhaging users and stem its financial decline. As we've known (and as we predicted last year), the site will shift its emphasis from pure social networking to content discovery and recommendation. The site's tagline is expected to change to "Discover and Be Discovered."

Everybody is getting in the game. Google just announced Buzz, its social feed add-on to Gmail, last week and today Microsoft is bringing the feed to Outlook. Microsoft first announced its social media add-on, the Outlook Social Connector, last November but today begins the public beta period for LinkedIn for Outlook. The company has also announced partnerships with Facebook and Myspace.

MySpace and Google just announced that starting today, status updates from MySpace users will appear in Google's real-time search. MySpace announced its real-time Stream API in December and Google launched its real-time search feature just a day before the MySpace announcement. While Google was one of MySpace's launch partners (together with OneRiot), it took Google until today to include MySpace updates in its real-time search.

From the moment people had the ability to upload video content to the Web, they took the liberty of posting anything and everything they could find - whether they owned the rights to the content or not. Unfortunately, this caused the people who did own the rights to the content a great deal of heartache, as that free distribution channel cut into their profits. So they fought back with lawyers, take-down notices, and other legal threats. Where did it get them? Not terribly far.

But now, a new partnership between MySpace and MTV Networks might have those content owners changing their tune - and actually encouraging people to upload all the content they want.

While social networks can sometimes overlap in features, there are a selection of features that you can only find on one network or the other. This has been the case for Facebook and Myspace users for years. However, Myspace is looking to play catch-up this week. The popular social network has launched a new video feature that Facebook members have had for months. Myspace users can now record a video directly from their webcam and upload it to their Myspace profile.