Profile 2.0 is going to make a lot of MySpace users unhappy, but only if they're truly happy with their current profile. We think anyone that's been waiting for Myspace to do some serious spring cleaning on how users can customize their profiles is going to love Profile 2.0. To access Profile 2.0:

• Make sure you're not logged into MySpace
• Head to MySpace Canada
• Login to your MySpace account as you normally would

You should now see a small yellow box at the top of your MySpace homepage inviting you to try out the Alpha of Profile 2.0.

What MySpace Should've Looked Like in the Beginning

Profile 2.0 allows for users to customize a lot more of their profile than words. Users can now drag and drop modules, add and remove modules, change themes, privacy settings, profile layouts and more. The advance edit mode allows those with more advanced HTML knowledge to fill out their profile with custom CSS and offers more control over module styles. You are also presented with a visual preview of every change made.

Rearranging My Space

All in all, the new Profile 2.0 will be a great tool to use once it goes public. However those that are already using custom templates from the thousands of sites that offer free MySpace themes may be at a loss until web designers catch up. Profile 2.0 will break most of the custom MySpace themes available. If you choose to try out Profile 2.0 MySpace reserves your 1.0 profile just in case you don't like what you see in Profile 2.0. In any case, back up your current profile settings before trying out Profile 2.0.

Hitwise also noted that MySpace has seen an increase of 73% year-over-year in average time spent. So while they may be losing a small amount of total social networking traffic to Facebook, MySpace is better engaging the visitors it has retained. Interestingly, competing web metrics firm Compete paints a different picture, suggesting that year-over-year average stay has fallen 9.9%. Differences in how each stat is measured could explain the dissimilar results, however, though they are strikingly different.

For the rest of us who keep accounts there primarily to facilitate discovery by old, non-technical friends - the new spam controls will probably be the only change that matters. What a change it is, though! If you've been tempted to cancel you MySpace account because you're tired of porn stars trying to be your friend (is it just me?) now you can log in and change your account settings to block automated friend requests. Sweet. What took so long?

Social Classifieds

The new classifieds section is also going to make better use of MySpace's social tools, allowing users to target their MySpace friends for their listings. This social aspect is what can give classifieds on MySpace (or any social network for that matter) a competitive advantage over Craigslist. At the same time, though, it's noteworthy, as Caroline McCarthy also points out, that Facebook's classifieds section has never quite become an important service on the site.

The only classifieds sites Oodle doesn't scrape are Craigslist and Kijiji. The relationship between Craiglist and Oodle has been especially rocky, as we reported here. By basically providing a meta-search service, Oodle relies less on its own active users to provide a comprehensive service.

The most advanced features of the MySpace integration, however, only work for ads posted by MySpace users themselves. Right now, there are not too many active listings posted by MySpace users, yet. However, as these ads start making their way onto users' profiles, using MySpace Classifieds for ads could easily become a viral phenomenon on MySpace.

Just last week, MySpace also announced that its users can now sync their updates with Microsoft's Live profiles. For now, the new two-way sync feature only works with Twitter, though the company notes that it will soon support other networks as well.

AOL also just announced two-way syncing with Twitter when it launched its AIM Lifestream service last week.  Overall, these services aren't very earth-shattering, but it is good to see that MySpace continues to open up and create more links with other services.

It's also becoming increasingly clear that Twitter is now the de facto clearinghouse for status updates. Pretty much every new service that features status updates already pushes updates to Twitter and now most of the older services are also (slowly) coming on board.

"The audience for MTV2 and MySpace are incredibly similar," commented Philip O'Ferrall, VP of digital media, MTV Networks UK & Ireland. "Not only are they both incredibly passionate about their music tastes but they are powerful advocates for the latest up-coming artists, which both MTV and MySpace have a history of showcasing."

"The way that consumers are accessing music is changing. MySpace is the world's largest online music destination connecting bands and their fans," added Dom Cook, marketing director and head of music at MySpace UK.

This isn't the first time that MTV and MySpace have teamed up. The two previously collaborated in the hunt for a news presenter.

The partnership shows that MTV seems to be more interested in partnering with MySpace now, than trying to create their own social network and content. For example, just last month, MTV closed their own user-generated content based channel, MTV Flux and is now in the process of integrating the content into other MTV-branded channels instead.

The only question with the new show, "The MySpace Chart," is where is the U.S. version? The United States has more MySpace users and a bigger MTV audience...maybe the UK just has better music?

In order to use the new mobile photo upload feature, you must first log in to your MySpace account on the web to enable the setting. Once there, click on "My Account," then click "Mobile." You should see a section called "Send Photos From Your Phone." From here, you can set a password and MySpace will generate a unique, personalized email address for you to add to your phone's address book. The next time you take a mobile pic, you can just email it to MySpace using this address. The photo will show up in seconds. Unfortunately, there is no way to configure the mobile uploads to go into any particular album - they are all put into your "My Photos" album by default.

MySpace has had a mobile web site available for some time at m.myspace.com where you could interact with many of the service's features. However, there was no option to upload photos from that site.

Blackberry App Coming In "A Few Weeks"

In the comments of the blog post, everyone's friend "Tom" reveals some more news that wasn't mentioned in the original post. In response to a user's comment, Tom confirms that the MySpace Blackberry app announced last month is almost ready. Says Tom, the Blackberry app will be available "in a few weeks." (Wow, that's almost a year after Facebook released theirs!) Why is MySpace so slow to support mobile? Given Facebook's growing popularity, you would think that MySpace would have had these features and apps ages ago.

According to David Hasselhoff's Myspace profile,

Hi Guys! I have started my own social network and website. HoffSpace, located at www.davidhasselhoff.com. This is my new and official home. I won't be interacting much more on MySpace, so come on over and join the fun on HoffSpace. It's fun and safe.

Peace,

David

We're just as surprised as you. Apparently Hasselhoff wasn't pleased with the way he could interact with his fans on Myspace. Currently, HoffSpace has over 11k members and is still growing. While we don't expect it to reach Myspace's levels, we're following this story closely to see exactly where Hasselhoff takes things. Will this really make a difference? What has he done on HoffSpace to better interact with his fans? So far from what we've seen, absolutely nothing except that he has admin privileges and a better way to promote his work. Maybe this is what he wanted all along.

MySpace also announced that LG will preload the MySpace Mobile application on the next-generation of its Windows Mobile 6.1 phones.

The Future of MySpace is Mobile

MySpace, according to its own data, currently has about 20 million worldwide mobile users, and it offers mobile applications for all the major smart phone platforms, including the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Nokia, Palm, and Windows Mobile.

We know that MySpace, which has recently been overtaken by Facebook as the leading social networking site in the U.S., considers mobile social networking applications to be the next battleground, and this is definitely one of the reasons why the company is trying to get a foothold on all the major mobile platforms now. Whether this will be enough to hold back Facebook's current march towards dominating the social networking space remains to be seen, however.

Like Google's ad platform, the new MySpace ad platform allows anyone to establish an account and begin targeting ads to a particular demographic. Unlike Google, however, MySpace allows users to build image-based ads on the fly. What's more, advertisers will find the targeting options get exceptionally "granular."

Unlike traditional online advertising demographics, however, the MySpace targeting includes some very MySpace-specific options, including "drinking," "partying," and professional wrestling:

And this type of granularity - providing a true view into its user base - could be the key to MySpace's success.

In fact, when announcing the private beta of the service last year, MySpace claimed that this new "hypertargeting" technology would drastically improved online advertising with results "as high as 300% over demographically tageted ads."

To date, all popular social networking sites have struggled with converting a wealth of users into a sustainable revenue stream. MySpace is no different.

Advertising seems to be the most viable means of doing that. And with the information at its disposal, perhaps no one is better positioned to provide targeted advertising than MySpace.

Will advertisers adopt this "hypertargeted" platform with the same vigor that has catapulted Google to such incredible heights? That remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure, with myAds, MySpace has taken a decided step forward in attempting to drive revenue using its most valuable asset: its users.

If you are using MySpace, here is a short walk-through for how to enable this feature in Windows Live.

Overall, this implementation isn't very exciting, but while both MySpace and Windows Live aren't generally considered to be the most cutting-edge services by the digerati anymore (and MySpace is clearly on a downwards trend), there can be no doubt that they both command a large share of their respective markets. This cooperation between Microsoft and MySpace should also give the activitystrea.ms standard a good boost.

As pointed out by intrepid explorer of the interwebs Chris Messina, there's now live code for OpenID authentication inside every MySpace user's profile. View the source on yours and you'll see it. This should be more than just single sign-on, too.

According to John McCrea's live-blogged coverage of the much needed OpenID/OAuth UX Summit this weekend, MySpace has some interesting plans up its big, teenaged sleeve. There Max Engel, MySpace's Product Manager of "Data Availability" said that the company will support OpenID, OAuth, and a hybrid of the two. They will use a pop-up iframe that allows the user to stay in context.

Does that imply that there will be OpenID and OAuth logins on MySpace for use with other OpenID providers' accounts? Or only that MySpace will give the world an iFrame the rest of us can use to login using our MySpace ID as an OpenID? Probably the latter, but maybe the former!

Either way, really, this is great news. Facebook Connect is making it easy for 3rd party websites to tie their users to Facebook authentication and friends lists, but MySpace has the opportunity to reach a different constituency and raise the bar on both how much user data is exposed to developer and how well it's protected for privacy-minded users.

We hope that the addition of OpenID code to MySpace profiles means we can see something exciting and new in production soon.

• Facebook is the largest social network in the world with well over 100 million monthly active users
• Rival MySpace has recently launched MySpace Music, and is currently more profitable than Facebook
• Facebook is rumored to be partnering with either iLike, imeem, LaLa, or Rhapsody

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rww_predictions_facebook_music_coming_soon.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rww_predictions_facebook_music_coming_soon.php Predictions Sun, 26 Oct 2008 19:14:22 -0800 Corvida

Social networking site MySpace is releasing a set of APIs later today that will allow developers to implement protocols for exchanging and synchronizing user profiles between their own applications and MySpace profiles. Users can share their basic profile information, as well as their MySpace photos, videos, and friend list.

As we reported earlier, MySpace has signed up a number of high profile partners for this launch: Yahoo, Twitter, eBay and Photobucket.

]]>Sponsor

]]> This is, of course, a direct competitor to Google's Friend Connect and Facebook's Facebook Connect, though, as Steve O'Hear notes on ZDNet, there are important differences between these projects. While Friend Connect relies on an iframe to exchange data between sites, the Data Availability APIs makes third-party services request the data from MySpace 'on the fly' and only allows a user's login name to be cached.

As Steve notes, if MySpace's Data Availability API is adopted by a large enough number of sites, it could make MySpace the de facto host for social network profiles.

The details around Facebook Connect are still a bit unclear, but Facebook will probably update its developer community about its plans at next month's F8 conference.

For users, being able to have their profiles linked between different services is a major step forward in terms of usability. It would be very convenient to have a Twitter profile automatically synch with a MySpace (or any other service's) friend list, or only having to update photos on Photobucket and then see them directly on MySpace.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/myspace_data_availability.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/myspace_data_availability.php News Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:33:55 -0800 Frederic Lardinois MySpace officially opened its Application Gallery to all users this morning after launching it in public beta last March. In that time over 1,000 applications have been approved and added to the gallery and there have been over 2.1 million application installs across the site. Today, MySpace began promoting applications to users by adding an icon for the gallery on MySpace.com and a link on user control panels.

]]>Sponsor

]]> Every application on the MySpace platform will receive its own profile, similar to musical artists, which will allow developers to communicate directly with their core audience -- those who have "friended" the app. Facebook has started down this road by encouraging app reviews and more recently letting users become "fans" of apps, but applications really need to set up separate "Pages" to get the same functionality that MySpace will bake in.

"MySpace was the original open platform, and the MySpace Application Gallery is the evolution of that vision, taking MySpace users around the world to the next level and empowering them to take control of their online presence in new and exciting ways," said MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe in a press release. While it's a bit of a stretch to call MySpace the original open platform (they apparently forget that nasty time a couple of years ago when they were blocking widgets left and right and thought the better strategy was to build competing service - see: MySpaceTV vs. YouTube), it is likely that apps will play well to the MySpace crowd.

We're not sure if they'll empower anyone to "take control of their online presence," but the same crop of silly, fun applications that have done so well on Facebook, should play to the MySpace audience as well.

When MySpace launched their app gallery in beta in March we noted that application spam, a problem that has plagued Facebook, may be a large hurdle to adoption unless the company can nip it in the bud. "MySpace has largely killed the messaging spam that plagued its user experience for so long, [so we] don't imagine users will be happy to see something like it back again," we wrote. MySpace has already started putting app notifications in their equivalent of the Facebook News Feed, with all of their 120 million exposed to applications, it will be interesting to see if app spam becomes a problem.

Today is an important day for the MySpace platform, though. We fully expect a quick uptake from MySpace users, who have already shown an affinity for widgets. The long term success of the platform may depend on whether MySpace can keep the noise to an acceptable level.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/myspace_app_gallery_launch.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/myspace_app_gallery_launch.php Social Networks Thu, 24 Apr 2008 05:00:01 -0800 Josh Catone