I've never been a MySpace fan due to a few things:
- It's annoying when songs and videos often start playing when you open a MySpace page (sometimes both at the same time)
- Profile pages are often cluttered and unorganized
- I am a Facebook user. Most of my friends are Facebookers, too. I've just never had a real need for MySpace.
That said, MySpace is still a great place to be for certain brands and people, especially artists who are trying to promote their music. So for a look at some recent MySpace buzz, check out the following links.
MySpace the Place for Targeted Ads - MySpace is beta-testing a new behavioral targeting ad system. John Gartner makes a good point that while this will lead to better placements for advertisers and more relevant ads for users, there should be some kind of opt-out policy, so people can control what information is shared about them. However, I'm not sure we'll see this as Google does similar targeting with the content-relevant ads it shows above and beside messages in Gmail.
MySpace is Safe After All - A National School Boards Association (NSBA) study has concluded that social networking sites like MySpace and Bebo are far more harmless than most parents (and the government) currently think. Only 7% of kids and teens surveyed have been the victims of cyberbullying (yes, apparently there is such a thing). However, the study was partly funded by MySpace's parent company, News Corp. Is Big Brother News Corp cyberbullying researchers now?
MySpace Revenue to top $800 Million in Fiscal 2008 - MySpace expected to benefit from it's deal with Google to monetize search results, in addition to the fact that more companies continue to jump on the social networking bandwagon.
MySpace Ads Onion to Website Recipe - Yesterday, MySpace announced a partnership to deliver the Onion's tongue-in-cheek stories online at http://myspace.com/onionnews. Now that MySpace has joined forces with the internet's most credible, most reliable news source, I might just have to check it out...
If you've got any other interesting links to recent MySpace news, feel free to post them in the comments.