I just noticed that on my Alexa.com toolbar (owned by Amazon.com), Google’s rank looked a little different.  The web information company’s toolbar was telling me that Google is no longer glazed in bronze.  It had a silver spoon in its mouth.  Oh for crying out loud, If you don’t get my metaphor, what I’m saying is that Google is now ranked #2 and MSN is ranked #3.

Alexa’s Global Top 10:
1.) Yahoo!
2.) Google
3.) MSN
4.) YouTube
5.) Live.com
6.) MySpace
7.) Orkut
8.) Facebook
9.) Wikipedia
10.) Hi5

Looking at the top 10 web sites, Google has the most presence on Alexa.  They are ranked #2 and they own #4 and #7.  Whereas, Microsoft only owns #3 and #5.  Google also has a presence on #6 because they have an exclusive advertising partnership with MySpace.com.  Microsoft counteracted that move by signing an exclusive partnership with #8 website, Facebook.com. It seems like both companies were playing with their domains a little bit over the last year or so.  We saw the rise of Live.com this past year and GMail.com shifted over to the Google.com servers.  Below is a chart comparison from Alexa:

Notice the instant growth of Live.com?  This is perhaps because Hotmail.com shifted over to Live.com servers.  Seeing as how Live.com is constantly growing and MSN.com is slipping a little bit, I’m curious to see what Microsoft will do with MSN to ensure it doesn’t slip more.  And also, what will Yahoo! do to maintain #1.  Over the next couple years, we should see some interesting changes in the Top 10, especially seeing as how it felt like YouTube and Wikipedia came out of nowhere and claimed their current spots.

News Corporation-owned social network, MySpace.com has recently launched a mobile version of their site. The official announcement will be made soon. The URL for the mobile site is: http://mobile.myspace.com.

“Accessing the Internet from your mobile phone will soon be as common as text messaging and voice calling,” stated John Smelzer, the senior VP of Mobile at Fox Interactive. Fox is a subsidiary of News Corporation.

Other Fox Interactive Media properities, Photobucket, FoxSports.com, IGN, and AskMen.com will also soon be going mobile. MySpace mobile users will be able to send/receive messages and friend requests, comments, add posts to bulletins, update their blogs, and find/search friends.

Information Source:
[1] Wilmington Star: Myspace to Launch Ad-Supported Cell Phone

If you are a MySpace user, you may realize that you REALLY like the ads that start appearing next to your profile. This is because News Corporations’s prized social network possession, MySpace.com is collecting personal information contained within profiles and blog posts and selling advertisements.

Adam Bain and Arnie Gullov-Singh are leading MySpace’s targeted advertising efforts. Peter Levinsohn, President of FOX Interactive Media addressed the intiative at a Merrill Lynch conference in Los Angeles, Calif. today. “We are blessed with a phenomenal amount of information about the likes, dislikes and life’s passions of our users,” stated Levinsohn. “We have an opportunity to provide advertisers with a completely new paradigm.”

(more…)

On the right corner and weighing at 90 million lbs. is the Web 2.0 social network juggernaut, MySpace.com[1]. And on the left corner, we have TheGlobe.com[2], a company that had dominated the world of Web 1.0 in the late 90s. The battle is regarding spam.

MySpace claimed that in June 2006, TheGlobe.com sent out nearly 400,000 unsolicited messages to MySpace users from 95 or more fake accounts. MySpace accused TheGlobe.com Inc. for violating the CAN-SPAM Act and the California Business & Professions Code Section 17529.5.

MySpace was entitled to $5.5 million in damages from TheGlobe.com. According to the press release[3], “This is the first court ruling in the United States enforcing a liquidated damages provision such as that found in MySpace’s Terms of Use.”

“This ruling sets a new precedent enabling us to further protect our members from phishing and spam,” stated Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer at MySpace. “We hope it sends a strong message that MySpace will take aggressive steps to stop those who violate the law and damage our members’ experience.”

Currently, TheGlobe.com takes a user to the homepage of Tralliance (”travel alliance”), a company that owns the domains, www.search.travel and www.directory.travel.

[1] MySpace.com
[2] TheGlobe.com
[3] Business Wire: MySpace and The Globe.com Announce Settlement

There are clearly sex offenders lurking around MySpace and government officials from 8 different states want to know who they are, where they live, and the names. 

“The fact that MySpace failed to come forward immediately with this information is really staggering,” stated Richard Blumenthal, the attorney general of Connecticut.  While the government officials requested action to be taken by May 29, MySpace responded by saying that they are already proactively deleting accounts.

MySpace started working with Sentinel Tech Holding Corporation in December 2006 to implement “Sentinel Safe” technology to match databases of sex offenders with users on MySpace. 

In a press release, MySpace’s Chief Security Officer, Hemanshu Nigam stated: “We are committed to keeping sex offenders off MySpace. Sentinel Safe will allow us to aggregate all publicly available sex offender databases into a real-time searchable form, making it easy to cross-reference and remove known registered sex offenders from the MySpace community. The creation of this first-of-its-kind real-time searchable database technology is a significant step to keep our members as safe as possible. [Source: SentryWeb Press Release].”

There are really two perspectives on the state government reaction.  This could be a violation of privacy or the initiative could really be for the good of the community.  I do not exactly believe in permanently stapling judgment on people based on past actions.  For example, the Statsaholic founder, Hornbaker has a dark past but was doing it for the sake of his family.  At the same time, I do not feel empathetic for cyber-criminals.  Its definetely tough to take a stance on issues like this.

Recently, MySpace and Photobucket made a truce. The truce was that Photobucket would not violate MySpace’s terms of services again. The terms of service was that if Photobucket widgets and videos were to be embedded in MySpace profiles, there should not be advertisements contained. Especially because MySpace would not be benefitting from the revenue that Photobucket would be generating from the ads.

On April 24, the truce was made, but now MySpace wants to be more than just friends. It was confirmed today that MySpace has acquired Photobucket according to Mashable. The amount is reported to be $250 million. Photobucket was valued at $300 million by Lehman Brothers. Photobucket made $6.3 million in revenues last year according to ValleyWag. The company is reported to make $25 million+ in revenue this year.

Photobucket has 41 million users and received $10.5 million in funding last year from Trinity Ventures.

What does this mean for other widget ad networks? Andrew Chen, an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures e-mailed me his perspective.

[Additional coverage: TechCrunch, TechMeMe]

Alex Welch, the CEO and Co-Founder of Photobucket announced that their videos will now be reappearing on MySpace once again. Earlier this month, I wrote about the videos being taken down because Photobucket was supposedly violating MySpace’s terms of service. People were concerned whether Photobucket would have as many hits without MySpace’s backing.

Photobucket has 40 million users and close to 2.8 billion images uploaded so far. MySpace receives over 90 million visitors every month.

“Following discussions with MySpace, we’re pleased to announce that all Photobucket videos and remixes are enabled once more on MySpace with immediate effect. Both our companies are committed to putting our users first,” wrote Welch on the Photobucket blog. “Moving forward, we’ve established open lines of communication and procedures with MySpace to prevent a sudden block of Photobucket content in future. We want our users to be able to share their content and understand it must be within the framework of MySpace’s Terms of Service for it to appear on the site.”

This is great news for Photobucket and MySpace. MySpace users enjoy having Photobucket widgets.

As of this Thursday, MySpace will fully launch a feature called MySpace News.  The homepage will contain news stories that users can vote for an are added through a web crawler.  The news stories are expected to be unbiased towards News Corporation and MySpace news.

Some of the news stories that are appearing on the homepage right now are being pulled from TheOnion.com, MLB, Time.com, BoingBoing, and a couple of other popular stories.  A majority of the news pertains to analysis of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University shootings that occurred on April 17.

The new feature is powered by Newroo, a news aggregation company that Fox Interactive Media acquired around mid-March 2006.  The news will be filtered into 25 categories and 300 sub-categories such as sports and politics.

Around 10:30PM on April 10, MySpace started to remove Photobucket videos and slideshows.  YouTube videos are still embeddable.  The reason was because Photobucket violated MySpace terms of services.

After that questions were asked whether Photobucket would survive without MySpace.  Photobucket’s 40 million members.  Earlier this afternoon, I read an interesting article by LeeAnn Prescott, a Research Director at HitWise.

On Wednesday April 11, the day that most of the Photobucket videos and slideshows were being removed, Photobucket traffic increased 3.9%.  “Photobucket accounted for 73% of Photography category visits leaving MySpace (1.60/2.19) Photobucket is by far the most dominant photo website for MySpace users,” wrote Prescott.

What does that mean for MySpace?  This means that either users are forced to seek Photobucket alternatives to embed on their MySpace pages… essentially start from scratch.  Fortunately for them, MySpace has their own Slideshows feature.  Is MySpace asking their users to make a choice?  One of those “it’s either them or us” scenarios.

BusinessWeek claims that MySpace Plays Chicken with Users.  “MySpace allows its users to embed video, slide shows, and other features from third parties so long as they comply with our terms of service.  Photobucket recently began running an ad-sponsored slideshow and encouraged users to post these ads in bulletins and profiles throughout the community.  We spoke to the company about their actions, but they refused to respect our community’s terms and we had no choice but to disable their service,” wrote MySpace in a statement.

Alex Welch, a founder and the CEO of Photobucket said that the company was never contacted by MySpace.  “In general it goes back to brands wanting to interact with users, but it’s the user who has really chosen this route. And they don’t think it’s fair for that outlet to now be taken away from them, and neither do we,” he said.

MySpace Users, Who Are You Going To Choose… Photobucket or MySpace?

“This will be the largest advertising platform on Earth” stated Peter Chernin, President and COO of News Corp. on a media call that was reported on TechCrunch.  What Chernin is referring to is a future product announcement in collaboration with some of the leading media and Internet giants: News Corporation (owner of MySpace), NBC, FOX, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo!.  Advertisers that are already wanting in on the upcoming video website includes Cadbury Schweppes, Cisco Systems, Esurance.com, Intel, and GM.

“This is a game changer for Internet video,” stated Chernin. “We’ll have access to just about the entire U.S. Internet audience at launch. And for the first time, consumers will get what they want — professionally produced video delivered on the sites where they live. We’re excited about the potential for this alliance and we’re looking forward to working with any content provider or distributor who wants to take advantage of this extraordinary opportunity.”

When the video website launches, full episodes and clips of TV shows and movies like 24, Heroes, My Name is Earl, SNL, The Simpsons and movies Devil Wears Prada, Borat, and Little Miss Sunshine will appear on the website.

“This partnership is completely aligned with our continued investment in video on MSN and will allow hundreds of millions of our consumers to tune into a vast library of high-quality, safe and legal online video,“ stated Kevin Johnson, the President of Platform and Services Division at Microsoft Corporation. “Our alliance proves that you can deliver quality online video entertainment and protect intellectual property and copyright at the same time. We look forward to working together to explore additional opportunities to distribute this content across other Microsoft services and devices.”

The content will be delivered to users on News Corp.’s MySpace as well.  MySpace has 65 million users that will have access to the media content.  “The ability to embed video clips within over 160 million profile pages will empower members of the MySpace community to view, share and truly interact with some of the entertainment world’s most popular content,” stated Peter Levinsohn, President of Fox Interactive Media.

The name of the new video website is unknown, but Google executives have coined the gigantic media partnership, “Clown Co.”  I guess that is Google’s executive response to Steve Ballmer’s (CEO of Microsoft) statement: “Google built one very good business. They only have one thing they do. Everything else is sort of cute.”

“The reason why I am so bummed out about MySpace now is because recently they have been cutting down our freedom and taking away our rights slowly,” stated Tila Tequila in a blog post this weekend on her MySpace profile. “MySpace will now only allow you to use ‘MySpace’ things.” Tila’s dissatisfaction with MySpace widget-blocking initiatives is just one voice of thousands and possibly millions of users that are proactive on the website.

[Tila Tequila, Picture Source: Wikipedia]

Hoooka, a music player widget is now starting to become blocked on MySpace since the social network conglomerate currently has a deal signed with rival, Snocap [source: Mashable]. Some of the other widgets being blocked include Revver, Stickam, and Imeem.

MySpace receives over 90 million visitors every month and the parent company of the social network, News Corporation is looking to capitalize as much as possible from this. The $580 million acquisition price will make it more worth it for them by blocking widgets that aren’t paying them for allowance.

In response to Imeem’s widgets being blocked from MySpace, Dalton Caldwell stated: “Our users weren’t happy” and “If MySpace isn’t really ‘their space’ after all, maybe users will think about things differently.”

MySpace currently has a deal with Google: $900 million over three years for powering MySpace search.

MySpace has announced yesterday that they would be launching an “Impact Channel” where users can read the biography of various presidential candidates, add them as friends on MySpace, watch their MySpace videos, and of course: comment on their profiles. The Impact Channel will feature the profiles of 10 presidential candidates, five of them Democrats and five of them Republicans.

The homepage of the Impact Channel contains monthly categories where users can discuss political issues. This month’s category is Health & Safety. The homepage also has a section where users can nominate and vote for their favorite candidates in the form of MySpace Impact Awards.

“Our digital candidates banner will be the yard signs of the 21st Century and our political viral videos and vlogs (video blogs) are the campaign ads of the futures,” stated Chris DeWolfe, one of the MySpace co-founders.

The Impact Channel doesn’t just feature videos of presidential candidates, it also features videos that are relevant to various political issues. One of the more entertaining videos I noticed was a Stop Global Warming video by the Blue Man Group:

Terry Heaton, a former news director and author of the Pomo (Postmodern) Blog wrote today that MySpace.com is planning to get into the social news sector.  This effort potentially means that the company may be looking to compete with Kevin Rose’s Digg.com.

Called MySpace News, the service will launch in the 2nd quarter and would harvest real-time news/blog posts from around the web.  Users would be able to rate, comment, and submit stories through MySpace blogs.

This effort is also an initiative to compete with the revamped USA Today website.  USA Today’s website now features RSS and has an integrated social network that allows users to interact with each other and about different news articles as well.

More of this news to come when MySpace News launches.

I do not like MySpace compared to other social networks which is why I am glad to report that Alexa has confirmed that YouTube has a bigger rank and daily reach count than MySpace. This will probably irritate News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch even more since he has reportedly accused YouTube’s growth relying heavily on MySpace.

Google has a piece of the pie from both YouTube and MySpace. Google paid $900 million to power MySpace search. And YouTube Inc. became property of Google Inc. for $1.6 billion this past year.

[Source: Smaran Dayal]

Remember Friendster?  Bambi Francisco spoke with Friendster CEO, Kent Lindstrom and found out that Google is going to place ads and power Friendster’s search technology.  Friendster was founded in 2002 by Jonathan Abrams.  Google had made a similar deal with MySpace last year.

Yahoo! was the previous search technology partner with Friendster.  Now Google will benefit from Friendster’s 1 million monthly unique visitors.  Google’s contract with Friendster is supposed to last 2 years and the financial details were not disclosed.  Google paid News Corp, owner of Myspace, $900 million.

[Source: Bambi's Blog]