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.

So, against that backdrop we got a little suspicious when Lowe, just ahead of a Thursday appearance on the Ellen Degeneres show and the Saturday premiere of a Lifetime movie he's starring in, tweeted that Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning was going to retire after missing the entire 2011 season.

Sure, Manning and Lowe share the same Hollywood agency, and sure, @RobLowe was the first account Colts owner Jim Irsay followed when he signed up for Twitter. But how did ESPN and the rest of the sports media not see this for what it was: a well-timed public relations stunt?

Manning has been quiet on the retirement rumors so far, but his father Archie, older brother Cooper and agent have all said the series of tweets Lowe sent out Wednesday are unfounded. The tweets started going out around noon pacific time, just in time to fuel east coast drive-time sports talk radio.

"So I was tweeting that I heard this might be in the offing and then you learn the power of Twitter. That's a powerful, powerful medium," Lowe told DeGeneres in a show that was taped Wednesday afternoon.

Powerful enough to help save "Drew Peterson: Untouchable," starring Lowe as the Illinois cop accused of killing his third and fourth wives? The trailer of the movie has already gone viral, but not because of its commanding performances: Vulture said it was "so startlingly ultracampy that it may only be safe to watch through a pinhole, much as one would witness a solar eclipse." Peterson himself reportedly said it was "hilarious" when his attorney played it for him over the phone.

Indianapolis fans, however, weren't taking any chances and immediately began speculating about the depth of the friendship between the former West Wing star and Irsay, and linked to photos of the two to give weight to his footbal authority. Lowe told DeGeneres he hoped "against hope" that it wasn't true but refused to say where he got his information.

"Ellen, I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you."

"Don't do it. I have a birthday coming up," DeGeneres said

Best of all, with games like these, kids will no longer be passively glued to their sofas as this new AR project encourages the kids of stand and use their body and arms to control the games. The Do Crew developers state that their mission with the game is help combat the growing epidemic of child obesity.

"Children will not stop watching television, and parents will not stop feeling guilt about that fact. So, where does that leave us? It leaves us with a rare opportunity to acknowledge this epidemic and treat it at the most basic level," the site says. "The Do Crew team is dedicated to making all passive media active, and we believe that with a little technology and imagination we can reimage the personal computer or console video game system as effective electronic exercise equipment."

Going after the children's entertainment market could also be a boon for the augmented reality industry which has yet to find the public spotlight. Time Magazine named AR as one of the top tech trends to watch in 2010, and by engaging children, AR may be able to make significant strides towards mass public adoption and acception.

Actually, AR experiences aimed at kids are not a new concept; a LEGO Store installation that helped kids see 3D reprensentations of model kits right on their boxes, and a web-based Topps baseball card experience that made the players on the cards come alive in 3D are two of the most well known AR roll-outs to date. New projects like Do Crew are not only great for kids, but also for AR as a whole as it strives to gain credibility and traction with as wide an audience as possible.

The unidentified customer "plans to embed the PicoP engine inside a high-end mobile media player for release in late 2010 and plans to announce its launch at that time." It is worth noting that the company has made technology designed to be used by the iPod and iPhone.

The pico projector uses laser light to produce high resolution, WVGA (848 X 480) images of up to 200 inches at a 5000:1 contrast ratio, which Microvision claims is five times higher than any of its competition. The projector can be attached to a computer or smart phone. It uses no focusing knobs or optics.

The company hopes to see a broad spectrum of personal and professional technology devices using the engine and projector.

Using Favit

With a very simple interface, Favit displays one Twitter post at a time on the screen. After reading the tweet, you can flip to see the next one using a finger swipe. If you see a tweet you want to star yourself, just tap the giant star button beneath the tweet.

You can also swipe down on the tweet for more interactions. Doing so reveals the author and then lets you re-tweet their post or email it to someone. In addition, clicking on the "+" (plus) sign lets you add the author to a special Favstar.fm list, which is synchronized with your saved lists on Twitter. This allows you to build your own personalized list of favorite twitterers, accessible from Twitter.com or any other Twitter client that supports lists.

What's Missing

Although the iTunes app description notes that Favit has a celebrity and tech filter built in, we couldn't find these settings in the application itself. However, you can follow these pre-filtered lists via the Favstar.fm website's Leaderboard section. We hope this feature is coming to the application in an update, because it would be great to switch from the funny and entertaining tweets, over to the tweets from the tech- and social-media set, and then over to celebrities, depending on what interests you at the time.

Another missing feature from the application is one of our favorite features from the Favstar.fm website - the ability to see who has been favoriting your tweets. The Favit app could offer a quick and easy way to track those people and then add them to a list or follow them, but sadly it does not. Still, that's hardly a deal-breaker since Favstar offers RSS feeds for this purpose via their website. Besides, it's clear the app is meant to be more of a fun toy for casual users rather than a handy utility meant for data-obsessed folks like us.

If you want to check out the new Favit application (iTunes link), you'll have to fork out a little cash. Favit, unlike similar time-wasters including the above-mentioned FML and Cool Facts, doesn't come in free and pro versions. Instead, it's one price only: $2.99. That may seem like a lot for an app just meant to amuse you, but the next time you're terribly bored, you'll be glad you downloaded it.

Thanks to Nokia's partnership with Kring, their upcoming Ovi Store (aka the Nokia App Store) is going to kick off with some of the most innovative content that has ever come to the mobile platform. It's set to open in May soon after the store will feature Kring's new project and is code-named TEVA. As for what exactly TEVA will look like and what it will be about...well, details are still vague. Kring wants to make sure spoilers don't ruin the fun for the audience...or perhaps we should say "participants."

ARG Explained

What we do know, however, is that TEVA will be a combination of user-generated content and Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG). In you're unaware of what "ARG" means, it's when an interactive narrative is told using the real world as the platform. Instead of passively consuming this sort of entertainment, ARG players actively participate in it. A somewhat recent example of this is what ARG called the "Lost Experience," which launched back in 2008 as an online clue hunt developed by ABC for fans of the TV show "Lost." In this game, web sites across the net contained clues that when pieced together told a story that tied into and paralleled that of the show. Another example would be the ARG created for the band Nine Inch Nails to promote their "Year Zero" album. This time the adventure started when concert goers found thumb drives in the bathrooms that contained unreleased songs and clues.

TEVA is No Ordinary ARG

So the idea of an ARG isn't an entirely new one, but using the mobile platform to play the game is...at least like this. You see, TEVA isn't just a traditional ARG moved to the mobile platform - it only involves some elements of that type of story-telling mechanism. Another piece to this mobile experience is user-generation content. This is a new twist. In the past, ARG players would just interact with the story line - now they're going to help create it. And yet another aspect to this mobile experience will be local. Gameplay takes place in your city - not just in an application or just on the web. How exactly this happens, we don't know, but TEVA will use GPS and other location-based services in some way. 

So What Do We Call This?

When we asked if there was a name for this type of entertainment, Kring said perhaps we could call it a "mobile immersive experience." It's a bit long, but it works.

Since there aren't a ton of details about TEVA yet, we have to use our imaginations to guess at what sort of interactions might be included. Based on some of the other discussion topics that evening, one of the possibilities that may come into play in this new mobile experience is an augmented reality application.

At the dinner, one of the Nokia execs described how we could use our mobile phones to record geo-located images and videos and tag them with specific keywords. This media could then only be accessed when you arrived in the same geo-location with your mobile phone. For example, if you showed up at the local park, you could pull up a video of your friends playing Frisbee there last week. This "mirror world," as it is being called, isn't so much an "alternate" reality, but a real one...just one that's been recorded, tagged, and archived. With this, we sort of become the ghosts of ourselves.

The Possibilities are Endless

The TEVA project will initially launch in the Ovi Store while it's being developed for other mediums (iPhone? Web? This, too, is unknown.) What is known, though, is that Kring is extremely excited about the project. As a creative, he's less interested in the technical details of the technology itself - just what it can do and how he can use it to create an entirely new entertainment experience.

Kring noted that there are already mobile applications that allow you to go out into the real world and "collect clues, send things, create things, and share with other people nearby...using the locative qualities of the phone. Once you get the parameters of what these services can do," he continued, "then your imagination is the only thing that stops you...if you attach a narrative to that."

TEVA will launch this summer and will be rolled out regionally.

Above image is the TEVA logo.

Entertainment is increasingly the center of our lives, and we also want work that challenges and entertains. With the rise of the Social Web and new forms of communication like Twitter, iPhone, YouTube and others, entertainment is just a click away. In this post we look at today's Web through the prism of both entertainment and utility.

Help me: Search, Business Tools and Autocomplete

Search is the most important utility on the web and is indispensable in business. Whether you're a programmer looking for a library, a researcher seeking a scientific paper, or a doctor wanting detail about a drug, search helps you find information.

Today's search is dominated by Google. Much has been written about Google stagnation and many attempts to improve the search, but the fact remains, people prefer Google. Yet there has to be a better way to search. After each query we must sift through myriad choices. And we start each new search from scratch.

We're looking for software that will guide us through the pile and help us find the answer.

In business we have a set of tools to help get things done. From Microsoft Office to the skinny gems from 37 Signals, business tools enable us to collaborate, manage projects, sales pipelines, contacts, etc. While we complain about these tools, the fact is we couldn't do without them.

The most important factor about business tools is context. The best tools understand what we're doing. The best tools encode business flows and processes, and guide us through the process.

Back in 2003 at IBM, I encountered a giant flow chart that described the process of releasing a piece of software. My immediate reaction was, this needed to be a piece of software because no human could work through it without making a mistake. This is what software is for, to help us deal with complex processes.

The autocomplete function is common in your search box, iPhone and spell-checker. Autocomplete mode works by listing a set of choices that match what you typed. Imagine in the future most utility software understanding the context of what you're doing and offering an autocomplete: choices that make sense in this context.

We already see this in many systems. All popular IDEs offer automatic fixes for common programming errors, iPhone understands that you're looking at a phone number and offers you to make a call. Google understands that you searched for an address and shows you a map. These are examples of autocomplete or shortcuts, based on your context.

Truly helpful software of the future will be a sequence of shortcuts that understand your context and help you navigate to the next step. The computer will present the choices and the decision will be yours.

Entertain me: Twitter, Randomness and Recommendations

While utilities are getting more rigorous, entertainment software is getting more casual.

The new entertainment is based on a couple of patterns. First is brevity. With increasing (and nowadays unbearable) amount of information and choice, modern entertainment software knows it has your eyes for only a limited time.

Twitter is the proto entertainment riding the exponential curve of popularity. The reason is it's short. But there's another aspect to Twitter that's part of a broader pattern. Twitter is casual.

The Twitter UI is a flattened list of messages intended to be scanned. Unlike its archetype email (link), which is meant to be drilled into and answered, Twitter places no obligation on reading or replying. It's a feel good, hedonistic experience not meant to last more than a few minutes.

Modern entertainment is more casual and short because with ubiquitous web access, rise of the social web and work from home, people want to be entertained during the day. Nothing that takes a long time could work, but checking Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook for a few minutes is fine in most people's minds.

The other face of casuality is randomness. Apple made a brilliant move when it released iPod shuffle; a lot of people don't care about the order songs play. Netflix cracked it with the Queue a long time ago; many people don't care what movie to watch tonight as long as they pick it at some point. Digg shines with its top news because people are looking for random bits of information.

We still talk about personalization, and ideally we'd love to get the right recommendations for everything. But in the absence of such a magic algorithm, randomness and Amazon Bestsellers do the trick. We're entering the age where entertainment is a mode of browsing, where the browsing part is squeezed to 0. We don't want to spend time choosing entertainment. We want a quick pick, quick duration, quick satisfaction. Unlike business application where we must pay attention, we want entertainment to be relaxed, quick and simple.

Conclusion

Software is increasingly polarized into utilities and entertainment. Utilities help us work and are becoming more rigorous. We're looking for helpful software that understands our context and guides us through the process, whether it is search or a complex business task. Entertainment software is at the opposite spectrum, being casual, brief and random. We're unwilling to spend hours browsing, but instead seek quick and satisfactory entertainment.

And now, please tell us what business software is the most helpful to you? And what entertainment software you find the most entertaining?