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MySpace today announced a partnership with Citysearch that will bring Citysearch's database of local businesses to the social network's new MySpace Local service. Users on MySpace can now review, rate, and share content about businesses on MySpace Local, and reviews and ratings will appear in users' activity stream. MySpace will launch this service with support for restaurants and bars first, though it plans to include a wider range of businesses in the near future. MySpace Local will be available as a private beta today, and should become available to all users in the next few weeks.

MySpace just announced that it will bring its Open Platform to Windows Mobile phones. The new MySpace mobile application for Windows Mobile will be built on top of Microsoft's Silverlight platform. In addition, MySpace also announced its MySpace Silverlight SDK, which will make it easier for developers to build OpenSocial applications using Silverlight.

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

Red hot TV and movie site Hulu has added a major new feature this morning on the one year anniversary of the site. Logged in users are now able to securely pull in their list of contacts from Facebook, Google, MySpace, MSN and Yahoo. The company calls it "Hulu Friends." Though some skeptics have questioned the impact of social video watching, this kind of move is exactly what we've been hoping all sites around the web would do.

Identity providers are now making it easy for 3rd party content sites to turn content consumption into a social activity. From real-time conversation to recommendations, there's a whole lot of potential here. That said, we do have some concerns about Hulu's implementation.

A new social networking site for music called WorldSings wants to "unite artists and music fans from around the world." If that concept sounds a lot like what MySpace is doing with their music offering, that's because it is - but there's a twist. Like MySpace, WorldSings lets artists create profiles where they can upload music, videos, and concert lists as well as feature live events. Meanwhile, music fans can friend the artists and each other as they engage in music discovery on the network.

According to the latest data from HitWise, Photobucket, the leading photo sharing site in the United States, saw a rapid decline in its market share over the last twelve months. Photobucket commanded 36% of the photo sharing market in February 2008, but this number dropped to 27% last month. Most of this loss, according to Hitwise, can be attributed to a decline in visits to MySpace, which has always been the main source of traffic for Photobucket.

MySpace is announcing today that it is partnering with Citi to offer its users a co-branded credit card. We expect to start seeing cards flashed at retail outlets by 99-year olds named "bongkillah," or what have you. MySpace is a lot of things, and despite Facebook's formidable attack it remains wildly popular, but an institution of trust and responsibility MySpace is not!

That's exactly what the company is aiming to become, though, with this new partnership. The "Generation Forward" campaign will reward credit card users with music downloads and other tokens of thanks when they make "responsible choices" like pay their bills on time, donate to homeless shelters and promise to be nice to small animals. How much more surreal could this get?

While it used to be a bit of a media darling, it's not often that we write about MySpace anymore, but they continue to plug along - as one of the most popular sites on the Web. And, they continue to roll out new features for their user base. For many, these features may fall into the "too little too late" category. But it's still interesting to see which new MySpace features were a high priority to add or fix - especially for a site that seems to be rapidly losing touch with the audience that once embraced it.

According to a new report (PDF) from uptime monitoring service Pingdom, Facebook and MySpace, the two largest players in the social networking market, had very little downtime in 2008. Twitter, whose iconic Fail Whale adorned the service far too often at the beginning of the year, got its act together and was only down for 12 minutes in December. LinkedIn, on the other hand, saw an increased rate of outages in the course of the year.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, MySpace just made some major announcements. They've announced plans to develop mobile applications for the Nokia S60 as well as the much-anticipated Palm Pre. However, for most of us, the bigger news is the relaunch of the MySpace Mobile web site which will occur this week. Yet even with the updated branding and new user interface elements introduced by the revamped site, we wonder: will it be enough to win users back from Facebook?

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we look at the latest social networking statistics showing that Facebook has overtaken MySpace, review a product that's had great success using OpenID, continue our series on recommendation engines, check out the new version of Amazon's Kindle e-book reader, review 4 innovative location-based apps, and more. Also check out the highlights from our Enterprise Channel and Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb's new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.