MySpace

CNET News Daily Podcast: MySpace working on movie download service

In today's podcast we talk about a concept laptop that has four screens, as well as new SSDs the size of business cards that should make for even smaller notebook computers. We also get CNET News reporter Greg Sandoval in the studio to talk about MySpace's upcoming movie download service.

Today's stories:

HP unveils Skyroom video collaboration tool

Netflix awards $1 million for outdoing Cinematch

Toshiba brings out business-card-size solid-state drives

Sony catalog comes to Amie Street--with fine print

Intel debuts concept notebook with four displays

Official Gmail push comes to iPhone, Windows Mobile

MySpace, Hulu working on new video service… Read more

MySpace, Hulu working on new video service

Rupert Murdoch said in July he wanted to reshape MySpace into an entertainment hub, and sources say the site now plans to launch a new video service sometime in the next several months with the help of sister site Hulu, CNET News has learned.

The big question is whether MySpace's service will offer downloads or a subscription service.

Murdoch, the chairman of media conglomerate News Corp., intends to overhaul MySpace Video by bringing in a larger number of feature films, TV shows, and music videos. The social network's new video area will be given a major face lift, … Read more

MySpace unleashes two-way syncing with Twitter

MySpace announced in a blog post on Monday that the company will now offer two-way syncing with Twitter. The service is being rolled out immediately.

According to the company, MySpace users can now update their MySpace status and syndicate that update to their Twitter streams. Twitter updates can also appear in the MySpace user's "status and mood." Users can decide if they want status updates to be one-way or two-way.

MySpace said in the blog post that it's using OAuth to sync with Twitter. According to the company, users will be able to share data between … Read more

MySpace to open source data processing

MySpace today announced a new open-source project called Qizmt, a distributed computation framework developed by its data mining team.

Qizmt is based on the MapReduce distributed processing framework, well-known as a core part of Google's search indexing infrastructure. Qizmt, however, runs on large clusters of Microsoft Windows servers, an interesting sidebar to a computing style we most commonly associate with commodity Linux machines.

MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, … Read more

Hitwise: Facebook's 'Connect' pushed it past MySpace

Traffic firm Hitwise says Facebook eventually overcame MySpace in terms of U.S. traffic as a result of the launch of its Facebook Connect universal log-in product, according to a post from analyst Heather Dougherty.

"The number of Web sites participating in Facebook Connect has grown quickly to over 15,000 Web sites (globally) including CNN.com, NBC.com, ABCNews.com, Hulu, WashingtonPost.com, The Huffington Post, and others," Dougherty's post read. "And what is really interesting is to look at the year-over-year growth in the market share of visits to Facebook, because there is a … Read more

Obama tells kids to be wary of Facebook

It's not every day that a high school student gets some advice on social networking from a president.

So it was interesting to hear where President Obama's focus lay Tuesday when talking to 40 students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va., before his nationally broadcast speech to America's schoolkids.

There he was in the school library. Books abounded. Yet his focus fell on Facebook. According to the Associated Press, President Obama asked the 40 assembled kids, all sitting politely on nice wooden chairs, to think very carefully about their socially-networked content.

"Be careful what you … Read more

Back-to-school advice for safe & ethical social networking

Back-to-school time is an excellent time for kids, parents, and teachers to think and talk about the safe and appropriate use of the Internet and social-networking tools.

My message to parents and teachers is simple: embrace the technology that kids use, recognize that whatever you may lack in technology knowledge you make up in wisdom, and remember that you, too, were once a kid. Your first reaction to kid activity that may be a bit disturbing shouldn't be to freak out and shut down access but to take a deep breath, talk with (and listen to) the kids, and … Read more

MySpace ad exec Jeff Berman is out

At one point sources said he was a "dark horse" candidate to replace outgoing MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe, but now MySpace ad sales and marketing head Jeff Berman is departing the News Corp. division entirely.

Following rumors and reports earlier Thursday, the announcement was made in a company blog post by Owen Van Natta, the former Facebook executive who ultimately did replace DeWolfe as CEO of MySpace earlier this year. Berman, who had previously been the head of MySpace's video division, had been at MySpace for about three and a half years.

MySpace has enlisted the services … Read more

Source: iLike to debut downloads on Facebook app

I don't have it confirmed yet, but it appears iLike is preparing to integrate its new music download store into its popular Facebook application sometime soon.

According to one music industry source, Facebook users may be able to start buying downloads from iLike's Facebook app as soon as this week. Seattle-based iLike and its new parent company MySpace aren't wasting anytime testing Facebook.

On Wednesday, MySpace announced that it had aquired iLike for an undisclosed amount of money. The news that the two sides were close to the deal had leaked days ago, so it wasn't … Read more