MySpace has been losing traffic since 2008, when Facebook first surpassed it on Alexa. Last year, the company was sold for $35 million by News Corporation, who bought it for $580 million six years earlier. Its new owners, Specific Media, have tried to reposition the site as an online entertainment hub rather than a full-fledged social network. If early numbers are any indication, the refocus appears to be working.

If this particular trend line continues to move upward, it would suggest that the site's music-centric gamble was a wise one. It would certainly make sense, given the site's history. When MySpace first came onto the scene in 2003, it was used by independent musicians to share music and connect with fans, who quickly flocked to the site. By 2008, the site attracted nearly 80 million unique visitors per month and was considered the preeminent social networking service.

Specific Media's new strategy aims to capitalize on MySpace's roots while building new features and functionality to help better reposition the site as a music hub. Even as the site's popularity has declined among the general population, it continued to be big among bands and other musicians.

Over the years, the site has amassed a library of music containing over 42 million tracks, which positions it quite competitively with the likes of Rdio and Spotify, even if MySpace's content leans heavily toward unsigned and independent artists.

Is this enough to turn things around for MySpace? The site won't return to being the social behemoth it was before the rise of Facebook, Twitter and Google+. By more aggressively carving out this niche, its new owners could at least allow the site to grow and build a viable, more focused business.

Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud is also the second biggest investor in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which may explain why Murdoch opened a Twitter account at the end of 2011 and, more recently, has been making comments about how News Corp. "screwed up" MySpace.

"We did talk and exchange messages but not on Twitter," Alwaleed said.

Alwaleed started on the path to becoming number 26 on Forbes list of billionaires with a $590 million, 1991 investment in Citibank, which was struggling at the time. That was followed by taking a stake in Apple just before Steve Jobs engineered the company's resurgence.

When he hasn't been getting in political dust-ups on his new obsession, Murdoch has been making some interesting revelations on Twitter, including yesterday's tweet which amounted to his first public social media post about News Corp.'s role in MySpace's decline.

"Many questions and jokes about My Space.simple answer - we screwed up in every way possible, learned lots of valuable expensive lesson," Murdoch tweeted from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Thursday.

For those of you that are interested, these cases all cite a landmark decision Tinker v. Des Moines, where public schools are allowed to regulate speech that materially interferes or disrupts the learning environment. Back in the tumultuous 60s, students wore armbands to school and Tinker was adjudicated on that activity. But now the courts have to deal with the Internets, and activities that don't physically take place on a school's campus.

Topping off this week in school censorship news is the action of the administration of the Southern Illinois University at Carbdondale (SUIC) surrounding a labor dispute. A Facebook page that was until now open for comments about the situation had comments critical of the university removed, along with other comments that contained obscene language. Eventually, the only content left on the page were official university messages. Rod Sievers, a university employee being quoted here, said "a certain level of debate would have been permitted but because some of it was rude, profane, name-calling, we just couldn't keep up with it."

With the removal of the comments, the students created their own Facebook page here. Does a Facebook Wall constitute a public forum, or is it private even if it is controlled by a publicly funded entity such as SUIC? There have been no suits filed as yet about this action by SUIC.

MySpace went through several attempts to reinvent itself before being sold by News Corp in June. Its new marketing head Al Dejewski told Ad Age the company will shift its focus more intently on music and try to compete against the likes of Spotify and iTunes, .

Its new owners want to capitalize on the fact that even as regular users flee, bands and music fans still turn to MySpace. A launch campaign planned for later this year will feature an array of celebrities and major brands acting as promotional partners. Pop star and actor Justin Timberlake, who now owns a stake in the company, is acting as the site's creative director.

Can this next rebranding campaign save the fallen social giant? Having lost the consumer social networking game to Facebook, its renewed focus on music will put it up against a growing array of hot new players, from on-demand music services like Spotify and Rdio to group listening apps like Turntable.fm.

MySpace was sold to Specific Media in June for $35 million, six years after News Corp bought it for $580 million.

Why did MySpace fail? Why have Facebook and Twitter stolen its thunder? That will be a question for the ages, but one contributing factor may be the incredible hostility that MySpace had for outside application developers. MySpace thought, and said publicly, that all the rest of Web 2.0 was a leach, a monkey on MySpace's back. Below, an excerpt from a TechCrunch post I wrote about this five years ago. It looks pretty amazing now in retrospect and is a good reminder that today's leading companies should remember their humility.

Almost five years later, can you imagine Mark Zuckerberg saying things like this about, for example, Zynga?

News Corp. chief operating officer Peter Chernin told company investors today that, "If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether it's YouTube, whether it's Flickr, whether it's Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace." MultiChannel News is reporting that Chernin said there is no reason why News Corp. couldn't build parallel businesses, targeting YouTube in particular. "Given that most of their traffic comes from us," he said, "if we build adequate if not superior competitors, I think we ought to be able to match them if not exceed them."

What didn't get discussed in the coverage of Chernin's talk to the Merrill Lynch Media & Entertainment Conference today are the steps the company has taken that have made it more difficult for outside companies to spread their presence inside MySpace, like blocking external links in Flash widgets. Could more hindrances like that be forthcoming? [To clarify, this is the context in which Chernin's comments were made, he did not discuss blocking other company's widgets.]

While competitor Facebook won accolades for opening an API to outside developers, it's understood that there is probably zero chance of such openness from MySpace.

It's unclear what more MySpace could do by way of features alone to compete with YouTube. The MySpace video player has embedding, related videos, top videos and viewer comments. Chernin said that MySpace's video efforts have been small so far and estimated that between 60 and 70% of YouTube's traffic comes from MySpace. That may become less the case as the YouTube community develops its own stars who use MySpace pages as static points of reference, at most.

Chernin also said that the company was looking to put more of its own commercial video on MySpace. "You're going to see us starting to play more aggressively on the entertainment side of that site," he said. Commercial video on YouTube has been a big gamble, with some of it well received and some of it eliciting a very hostile response from users.

To summarize: the COO of News Corp. says that Web 2.0 is leaching traffic off of MySpace, that they can build their own services to compete with any of it and that there's going to be an increasingly aggresive commercial push on the site. That sounds both dangerously arrogant and like a real validation of fears that MySpace dependency is too risky for outside developers.

Sharing music with friends? Sounds like the final death knell for MySpace, doesn't it?

According to Malik, there will be deep integration of music into the social networking site, including a prominent link on the left-side of the screen alongside other popular destinations like "Photos," "Friends," "Places," "Groups," "Deals," "Pages" and "Games." Clicking the link will open up a music dashboard where users will be able to stream songs from Facebook's music service partners.

On this page, you'll see recommended songs from your friends, notifications of which friends listened to your recommendations, top songs and albums among your friends, recent listens from friends and a "happening now" ticker showing real-time information about the music your friends are presently playing.

Also included in the Facebook music roll-out will be a persistent playback and pause button at the bottom of the page, next to the chat icon. When you mouse over the button, you can see what's playing, and pause or play tracks.

The integrations, as described, sound like an obvious next step for the word's largest social networking service, as music is often a social experience. But oddly, it's been an area Facebook has historically avoided. Outside of third-party applications, there has not been a "Facebook Music" experience offered to the site's over half-a-billion users. That may soon change, it appears, if this report is true.

Killing MySpace at Last, Maybe Even Apple's Ping

The news comes at a time when Facebook's one-time competitor, the music-focused MySpace, is struggling to find a buyer. While MySpace's time has clearly passed, it was, at one time, the place where many people learned about bands, artists, and even recommendations from friends, albeit the latter often through the use of blaring, auto-playing tracks that bombarded you upon visits to a friend's glitzy profile page. With Facebook, the integration sounds better planned, even subtler in some ways. It's there for those who want music to be a part of their Facebook experience, but can be safely ignored by those who don't.

According to Malik, the music service will build on several of Facebook's core strengths - Facebook Connect, which allows users to log into external services using their Facebook ID and password, the now ubiquitous "like" button which may be used for "liking" shared tracks or bands, and, of course, the connections between friends.

Facebook's music service has the potential to succeed where Apple's own version of social music sharing, the iTunes service known as "Ping," has famously failed. With Facebook integration pulled at the last minute because Apple couldn't agree to Facebook's "onerous terms," Ping, not surprisingly, has failed to gain traction. Social, apparently, was an area where Apple should have realized how critical the Facebook integration truly was - Apple needed Facebook, but it seemed to think it was the other way around.

Now Facebook is stepping in to trounce both Ping and MySpace while avoiding having to deal with record labels itself, a battle it leaves up to its music partners. It's a formula that will likely work, further solidifying Facebook's status at the only social network you need, even if what you need is to hear some new music.

This one's called Altly, and it announced its plans to build an alternative to Facebook today with a lengthy manifesto on why privacy, personal data control, and data portability should matter.

But even if those are important considerations - and even with Facebook's track record of privacy snafus - building an alternative to the social networking giant hasn't been something that anyone's been able to do successfully.

What makes Altly different then? Well, its founder, for one thing. Dmitry Shapiro is a serial entrepreneur, the founder of the online video company Veoh, and most recently an executive at that other Facebook rival, MySpace.

Despite Shapiro's credentials, building a viable Facebook alternative has so far proven to be a Herculean task. Although the points he makes about Facebook's privacy flaws do ring true, Facebook has remained wildly popular.

Altly does have funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, but what the site will surely need is excellent execution in order to be successful. The product isn't ready for launch, but you can sign up and reserve your name. It could be a good sign for Altly that "Audrey" has already been taken (and not by me, I should add).

NPR music podcast All Songs Considered just released a show about breaking up with your favorite bands. It got me thinking about favorite web apps or services that I've broken up with. So in the tradition of Internet era music, I'm going to directly rip NPR's idea and breakup categories.

In this post I tearfully discuss past relationships with MySpace, Last.fm and Soup.io. I finish with a love story that has a happier ending: Flickr. I'd love to hear your own tales of web app woe in the comments.

I admit it, I broke it off with MySpace and hooked up with Facebook. Despite the fact that Facebook is loose with my privacy and takes away things I want from it (like third party widgets and tabs).

But MySpace brought this on itself. It became garish and trashy over time. All of my friends hated it. Even its corporate parent, News Corp, wants MySpace out of the house now. It's sad how MySpace declined after those party days of 2005-07.

Remembering The Good Times: Last.fm

I used to have a ball with music streaming service Last.fm. We'd sing together and dance the nights away. Last.fm would constantly surprise me with new music, bringing a joyful smile to my face. It even tracked my music listening (our pet name for this was "scrobbling").

Then Last.fm latched onto a big shot called CBS and it stopped surprising me as often. That's ok though, because new subscription music services have come along to take my breath away. My current favorite music squeeze is MOG, which lets me pick and choose which albums I listen to. Last.fm never did that.

(I still "scrobble" with Last.fm though, for old times sake.)

It's Not You, It's Me (Apps/Sites We Grew Apart From): Soup.io

This particular story breaks my heart, because I so wanted Soup.io to become popular. It's a lifestreaming service very similar to Tumblr and Posterous. Of the three, I felt that Soup.io had the best features. It still does, in many respects. My favorite feature is the full-text import of content from third party services (like Last.fm and Goodreads). Aggregating your content from all around the social Web is so much easier - and works better - in Soup.io than in Tumblr and Posterous.

Yet, this year I moved to Tumblr. Why? Because of its slickness and its far superior social network, which I admit I wanted to tap into. I feel so shallow, like I dumped a smart and quirkily cool nerd for the prom queen. Shame on me.

App or Website You'll Always Stand By: Flickr

Here's a 'happily ever after' story, to cheer you up. Despite having Yahoo as its parent (which has a reputation for not being able to look after its children), Flickr has been a mainstay for me over the years.

I'll always have a soft spot for Flickr, because it guided me into the new world of online photos back in 2004. Over the years Flickr has continued to host my photos, despite other sites like Facebook trying to woo me away. To this day I pay to be a premium member of Flickr - that's how much I love it.

(note: the lead photo of this post is from Flickr user crimfants, who photographed himself after a 1991 breakup - "It worked out for both of us," he concluded.)

So there you have it, 3 sad break-up stories from my life on the Web and 1 happy story. Thanks again to NPR All Songs Considered for inspiring me to write this.

Which web apps or services have you broken up with; and why?

News Corp bought the one-time social media titan in 2005 for $580 million and it has been bleeding money for several years. The move by News Corp to accept bids is akin to a sports franchise that tries to trade an underperforming player to get some nominal value before it has to just cut its losses and release him from the team.

Myspace has tried to recreate itself as a gaming, music and entertainment platform. It launched an email platform in July, 2009 that caught some traction but not enough to stop the hemorrhaging. The slow death of Myspace is akin to the transformation that has happened at AOL where the one-time giant service provider has turned into a content platform. Yet, where AOL has been buoyed by legacy money from its service provider days, News Corp has no such source of income from Myspace to fall back on.

Twitter passed Myspace in September 2010 as the third most trafficked "social media" site on the Web, according to comScore (even if Twitter is not exactly "social media"). It was said to be working on some "big stealth projects" last August but there has been no real news on what that could be since. Myspace was said to be looking for developers with "killer Ruby on Rails skills and experience with MySQL, NoSQL, Linux, Apache." The platform did launch Myspace.com/Everything, a hub for celebrity news and gossip, in the meantime. Yet, if that is the major innovation happening at Myspace these days it is no wonder that News Corp finally wants to rid itself of the burden.

Today Garg announced, in a Tweet, that she's left MySpace and is now working on business development at Twitter Inc. Twitter keeps scooping up the leaders from other giant tech companies, ReadWriteWeb reported first last month that Bing chief scientist Alek Kołcz left Microsoft to join Twitter as well. That sounds like as good a use of the company's coffers filled with venture capital as any.

Garg went back to school and received an MBA from Harvard in 2008 and then this technologist got a business job. She worked at MySpace for nearly three years doing business development. She joined in July, 2008 - one month after Facebook first passed the old incumbent in monthly traffic.

"Rita Garg is very driven - and very likable," says Tobias Peggs, CEO of OneRiot, who worked with Garg on integrating MySpace with his company's real time search engine. Will it be the geeky Garg that filters its way through the maze of hundreds of Twitter employees, or the big time ad salesperson ala MySpace. "Both," says Peggs, "that's why she's a great hire." Thus is the drama we all get to speculate on when one former market leader is being passed by an innovator with its foot on the gas pedal.

According to its page listing official staff members, Twitter appears to have hired at least 36 people in the last 3 weeks.

MocoSpace is a far-reaching service that began with mobile web social networking, then moved into casual games and last spring into smart phone apps. The company targets multicultural and youth audiences as young as 14 years old. It has raised $6.5 million in venture capital and is well regarded for its mobile advertising success. MocoSpace serves up 3 billion mobile Web pages each month, making it the fourth most visited mobile website online, according to one analyst firm last spring.

MySpace's mobile offerings could use a big kick in the pants. The company's recent iPhone app, for example, doesn't allow users to listen to music - surely one of the most popular requests its users would have.

If MySpace became a mobile network for listening to the world's popular and independent musicians on demand, that could be great news for users. That could also be a whole lot of licensing negotiations for a startup like MocoSpace to bite off.

We can't help but wonder if this announcement marks the end of an era or the beginning of a new one for the once-dominant social network, and we're looking to you, our readers, to find out.

Now, with Myspace bowing down and accepting that Facebook is the de facto login of choice, we have to wonder if the site has a chance at attracting the users it has lost to the other side.

What do you think? Will the Facebook integration bring you back to Myspace? Or have you moved on, never to look back? Let us know in our poll and in the comments.

With the launch of the "new MySpace," a social entertainment hub that allows for the discovery of music, celebrities, television, movies, games, videos, photos and offline events is revealed. But despite the company's radical changes and improved design, MySpace is still sending mixed signals about its future.

A funny little side note, before we begin: We, like all other tech press, received a press release about the new launch. What struck us as particularly funny was the misspelled website address pointing us to the online press materials. For such a critical moment in a company's history, it seems odd that the launch notice was handled in such a hurried nature. We hope the PR email isn't indicative of the whole shebang MySpace has planned.

New Branding: Clean, Modern, Risky...Weird?

For what it's worth, the new beta site is at least very different. It's cleaner and more attractive than in previous years when MySpace had earned a reputation for being the busiest, most cluttered and downright junky-looking social network on the Internet. The new MySpace looks like it was born this month - it looks modern.

Even the logo got a makeover. Instead of reading "MySpace," the (now black) logo reads "My" followed by a blank. The idea, probably cooked up by the marketing team, is that the blank signifies that MySpace can now mean different things to different people. It could be the place where you obsess over your favorite band or it could be the site you hit up for news on your favorite TV show, for example. It could be the "Gleek" fan club home, the company subtly reminds you through its press-ready image of the Glee topic page.

But the logo's new look is an odd choice, you have to admit. Will the Gen Y target demographic get the logo's intentions? Will they care? Or will this become the day when MySpace gave us the tech industry equivalent of "the Artist formerly known as Prince?" (Don't think it's that big of a deal? Check out All Things D's clever headline then: "The My-Fill-In-the-Blank-Space Reset Is Here..." We're wondering how the geniuses behind the logo revamp feel about that.)

Well, maybe all press is good press.

We're Not a Social Network!

The new MySpace has seemingly thrown in the towel on attempting to compete with the behemoth that is Facebook, or even the growing juggernaut of Twitter for that matter. With the update, it's easy for users to sync their social accounts to MySpace in order to share content from the site to other networks.

As far as the user experience goes, that too is brand-new. Forget the dancing gifs and sparkle text, the updated layout offers topical recommendations based on your interests (apparently powered by an actual recommendation engine algorithm that learns your likes the more you use the site), trending content featuring what's happening "right now" on MySpace - a nod to the immediacy of today's Web - content hubs focused on movies, TV and celebrities offering combined media and editorial, a personalized stream of recommended content, a "My Stuff" tab where the MySpace profile has been relocated to (sans dancing embedded images, mind you), and last but not least - you guessed it - badges. Because badges save everything.

Regular MySpace users can now be promoted to "Curator" status, too. These curators are basically MySpace junkies who contribute so much to the site that they achieve "power user" authority, at which point the network provides them with more tools and resources to expand their influence even further.

We're a Social Network!

We think perhaps MySpace should have killed the profile page altogether. That would have been a truly radical move. But hanging on to the status update box, MySpace "wall," personal photo galleries, the friends list and the profile page music player sends a clear message to users: MySpace is still a social network! If the company really wanted to sell us on its "all newness," the profiles would have been killed off entirely. Who needs profiles anyway, if you're just there to interact with media?

Mobile Coming Soon

MySpace is also promising all new mobile apps, including a mobile beta website and updated iPhone and Android apps. Those probably should have launched first. Didn't MySpace get the memo about the state of the mobile Web? It's kind of big. People could have praised the mobile experience and begged the company to deliver the refresh to the desktop website.

MySpace Worth a Look, but Worth Staying for?

All that being said, the made-over site is worth a look. We're not really representative of the core demographic MySpace aims to attract, but we may poke around to see if Bob Dylan is cranking out some new tunes. Oh he is! And it looks like MySpace does have at least some appeal to old fogies like us - Dylan has 219,908 billion friends according to his profile page! Wait, what? How many people have signed up for MySpace anyway? And here we thought Facebook was king with its half-a-billion users. That shows them!

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

The Wall Street Journal reports that new data from comScore puts Twitter in the number three spot for social networks, bumping Myspace out of the top three.

Twitter recently redesigned Twitter.com, which is still in the process of rolling out to all its users, and emphasized repeatedly during and before the event that it is not a social network. Nearly 80% of Twitter's users experience the service through Twitter.com and part of the purpose behind the redesign, said Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, was to reflect a change in how people can use the site.

"The usage on mobile really underscores what we think Twitter is for people...a real-time information network," said Williams. "You don't have to tweet any more than you have to make a webpage to use the Web."

Rosabel Tao, a spokeswoman for Myspace, told The Wall Street Journal that "any comparisons between MySpace and other Internet services are irrelevant as MySpace's mix of offerings is uniquely different and specifically focused on audiences under the age of 35."

While we are comparing apples to different types of apples here, we're going to have to say they are all apples, though, and not some oranges. With Twitter's recent redesign, its feed of status updates looks more and more like Facebook, a look that Myspace also recently adopted. So in the category of websites that provide user-created information based on the friends or connections we make, it looks like Twitter just took the number three spot...even if it isn't very social.

MySpace is in for a "major overhaul" in the next few months, owner Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp., said recently (MySpace Bleeding Money; News Corp Promises "Overhaul" Soon). But there are few clues as to what "Stealth Project Burn" might be and whether it would even be part of MySpace.com.

While this is MySpace, this group is autonomous, working on a different platform and roadmap.

What could MySpace be planning? Murdoch said the overhaul will be complete in the next few months, implying that it's already started. Earlier this month, we reported on MySpace's effort to add curated content to user news feeds (MySpace Preparing to Go Beyond Friends in Your News Feed) designed to drive traffic within the site.

MySpace still pulls 50 million visitors every month from the U.S. alone. But the network is struggling to remain relevant alongside Facebook and Twitter and continues to lose money for its corporate owners. It's become clear that MySpace needs to switch it up in order to attract users and figure out better ways to turn those users into money. Today is also the site's seventh birthday.

The site is experimenting accordingly. Already this year, MySpace has launched MySpace Mail, MySpace Events and a site redesign.

We've asked MySpace for comment and will update with the response. UPDATE: The response was, "can't specify what this project is at this stage."

But perhaps our readers have some ideas. What else is in the cards for MySpace? MySpace Questions? A geolocation product? A sister site?