ReadWriteWeb

Last July, MySpace decided to get into the email business and launched MySpace Mail. According to the latest data we just received from MySpace, this initiative has turned out to be a success for the social network. In total, over 15 million MySpace users now use the service to receive and send email with an @myspace.com address. MySpace smartly coupled its users' email addresses to their vanity URLs, which surely helped the adoption of the service.

Whether we're tweeting the minutiae of our daily lives from our cell phones, checking out the latest band pages on Myspace, chatting with friends on Facebook, looking up old high school buddies on Classmates or networking with colleagues on LinkedIn, we're spending more and more time on social networking sites than ever before. Leading the pack, of course, are the usual suspects: Facebook and Twitter.

As a matter of fact, according to Nielsen, we're spending 82% more time on social networking sites than we did just a year earlier.

In an effort to add one more story to the list of reasons why Facebook already rules the world and can stop trying, we find that Facebook is the social-network-login of choice by nearly 2-to-1.

Widget provider Gigya sent us some numbers from their social network login tool and in a three company competition, Facebook came away with 65% of the traffic, Myspace with 18% and Twitter with 17%.

We've been keeping an eye on real-time search company Collecta for a while now, and we've been consistently impressed with their product.

The startup has been making headlines throughout 2009 and is wrapping up the year with a bang. This morning, they announced a partnership with MySpace. The resulting utility is part pulse check, part search engine, and all fun. It also serves as an automatically refreshing reminder that this social network is far from dead yet, especially where entertainment properties are concerned.

Microsoft researcher danah boyd took a decidedly different approach when considering social networking at today's LeWeb conference. In speaking to a room packed with more than a thousand entrepreneurs, investors and journalists, boyd explained how we tend to focus on the positive aspects of social networking services. Technologists tend to praise web publishing for its ability to encourage artistic expression and public dialogue. In contrast, boyd makes the point that negative and disturbing web content can also serve as a vehicle for change.

Earlier this week Myspace announced a partnership with Google to deliver real-time status updates to the search experience. As of today, the company is furthering its real-time efforts by announcing the public release of the real-time stream, status and mood commenting, open search and photo upload APIs.

In a move of ninja swiftness, MySpace has acquired and subsequently shuttered iMeem in its entirety, even trashing the streaming/sharing music startup's API, which had heretofore supplied much-needed resources to a small but vibrant ecosystem of apps.

The acquisition was announced just yesterday, and developers were given no warning that their creations would become useless digital paperweights overnight. Among the detrius of the deal is twt.fm, a popular Twitter music-sharing app created by web dev Lee Martin, who tipped us off to his plight today in a blog post.

UPDATE: Users are also reporting problems with blip.fm, a popular music-streaming site that integrated results from iMeem.

Social networking site MySpace has just launched a new version of their mobile website designed for iPhone, Android and Palm WebOS users. The now-improved site at m.myspace.com offers quick access to your profile, including comments, your activity stream, your status, your inbox and more. Also available is a button dedicated to your photos, which makes it easier to browse through your albums. However, the most notable of the new features is the built-in instant-messaging function which makes the new mobile website a communication tool in addition to being just another social-networking app.

Being one of the first social networking sites in existence certainly doesn't establish you as the best or most popular. For this reason, Friendster leaked a video outlining its look and product features. According to TechCrunch, the company is set to release the new product features tomorrow morning. If the below video was meant to get prospective users excited for a revitalized service, they could have approached it from a different angle. Below are the top four reasons Friendster's new messaging needs to change.

One of the first social networking aggregators to take advantage of LinkedIn's brand-new API is Sobees, whose two client applications both now offer LinkedIn integration in addition to the other supported networks. A challenger to similar services like TweetDeck, Seesmic, and PeopleBrowser, Sobees is a social networking aggregation tool originally launched as a desktop app back in 2008 with a web app version added earlier this year. Like its competitors, Sobees' clients use a columnar interface to display real-time updates from sites like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.

The social media data company Rapleaf has just released the final parts of their 3-part study involving the demographics and online behavior of webmail users. In the first part of the study, gender and age data was examined and revealed some interesting findings...like the fact that Gmail has more female users than male, for example. In the final sections of the study, the company has turned its attention to social networking data to discover more details about webmail users' social media profiles, memberships and network preferences.

The wildly popular nonprofit fundraising application Causes reportedly emailed users of its MySpace app on Tuesday to tell them that all Causes will be removed from MySpace on Friday morning, in three days. Causes was co-founded by Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster, the Comcast-acquired Plaxo and Founding President of Facebook.

MySpace users of Causes were encouraged to post links on their MySpace profiles asking cause supporters to join the cause on Facebook instead. In abandoning MySpace, is Causes abandoning nonprofit groups organizing online with poorer users and people of color? Or are neither MySpace or Causes any big loss for social change organizations?

New data released from Experian Hitwise reconfirms what we've known for some time: Facebook is killing the other social networks. Nowhere is that more true than here in the U.S. where they found that the visits to the site have increased 194% from September of last year to September 2009. However, it's Twitter that's seen the largest year-over-year increase in visits - during that same time period, they're up 1170%. But one of the oddest findings being reported is how the social network known as Tagged is beating out Twitter for the number three spot in terms of visits.

Yesterday, amid all the news of Twitter's arrival into both Microsoft's Bing and the Google search engine, another major announcement was being made. MySpace is giving up on trying to be a major social network. According to MySpace CEO, Owen Van Natta, Facebook is no longer their competition. "We're focused on a different space," he says.

That "different space," as it turns out, is music...and it really isn't all that different, especially considering MySpace's roots. If anything, this major overhaul of the social network is an attempt to return the site to becoming the popular entertainment hub it once was.

"I didn't really use Facebook that much until I got my iPhone." Sound familiar? That sentiment and variations of it has provided powerful anecdotal evidence over the past several months about the impact smartphones are having on the way people are using the mobile web to connect with others. Through the mobile phone, today's more mainstream users - those folks who don't count sitting behind a glowing screen among their favorite pastimes - have begun to interact on the mobile web, specifically the social web, in greater numbers than ever before.

A new report by Openwave provides more evidence of this trend. Their findings show that four of the top ten domains accessed via mobile devices are social networking sites. Facebook and MySpace, of course, featured prominently on that list.

This morning, MySpace users got to see and participate in a live video chat with actor Gerard Butler and director F. Gary Gray through a MySpace promotional page that integrated popular streaming video site UStream.

Due to an unfortunate technical glitch, users ended up hearing the audio from the film's trailer over the interview audio. Overall, the audio was a mess, and UStream/MySpaceID integration for commenting was a popup-ridden, timeout-plagued, fail-inducing nightmare. Nevertheless, as a first-time integration of real-time, interactive video on one of the world's largest social networks, we suppose results could have been worse.

Oh how the mighty have fallen. The one time king of social networks, MySpace, now has the honor of being the site where the less affluent members of the online population stake their claims by way of bedazzled profiles overrun with auto-playing videos and songs. Meanwhile, the upscale, financially solvent users have moved on - and by moved on, we mean to Facebook, of course. At least those are the findings of the latest social networking study done by American consumer behavior analysis firm Nielsen Claritas.

Obsessed with Facebook? You're not alone. The hours you spend logging on to update your status, post photos, and make comments on friends' walls is not simply a "phase" you're going through which will end sometime soon. It's a ongoing trend affecting everyone these days and it has serious implications for the online advertising industry.

According to new figures from Nielsen, the amount of time spent surfing social networking and blogging sites had tripled since last year, suggesting "a wholesale change in the way the Internet is used," says Jon Gibs, VP of media and agency insights at the company's online division.

MySpace just announced that its users will now be able to sync their status updates with their Twitter feeds. MySpace users will be able to send their status updates on MySpace directly to Twitter and will also be able to import their Twitter updates to their MySpace feeds. This is currently just a beta product, but MySpace will roll this service out globally over the coming weeks.

Facebook just announced passing the 300 million active user mark. In early April ReadWriteWeb asked about the size of Facebook with the answer being - "bigger than the population of all but 4 countries in the world." As of today it's bigger than the population of all but 3 countries in the world and it's gaining on the US. Like any great nation, Facebook is asking it's citizens to pitch in. The company just launched Prototypes - a demo site for members to test early stage beta products. Similar to other lab environments, the company will offer users a chance to test new tools and give their feedback.