The Social

In the wake of acquiring smaller digital music services iLike--and now, it looks like, Imeem--MySpace continues to attempt to align itself as the foremost player in the digital music industry. On Wednesday, the News Corp. division rolled out a music charts page to track the most popular music getting listened to on the social site.

It's fairly self-explanatory. There's a prominent "movers" section featuring artists that have seen an uptick in activity recently, and music can be filtered by genre, country, and label category (indie, unsigned, or major). Then there are links to "friend" an artist, buy songs, and watch music videos on MySpace's recently launched music video portal.

(Credit: MySpace)

The design, regrettably, isn't very user-friendly and requires quite a bit of scrolling. And in a world of finely tuned "music discovery" and personalized recommendations, charts can seem a little bit static. A blog post from MySpace Music head Courtney Holt assures that it's "just the beginning of a product and platform evolution that reinforces the key messaging, vision and direction of the new MySpace Music."

MySpace launched its music service last year as a joint venture with major and independent record labels, and has received a mixed response as the industry continues to grapple with the fact that no non-iTunes digital music service has proven to be a huge moneymaker yet.

In the wake of a firestorm over just how much of social-gaming companies' profits can be attributed to potentially scammy offers and incentives, News Corp.'s MySpace has taken a stand (and, it could be said, taken advantage of the PR opportunity) by coming out vocally against them.

"We're adding a fifth principle (to our developer terms of use) that clarifies a specific use case that we feel is particularly damaging to the user experience: promotions that include hidden renewals without specific opt-in will not be permitted," a company blog post by CEO Owen Van Natta read. "Because it's our belief opt-out offers are misleading and do not have the best interests of the users in mind, we will be updating our Terms of Use this week to better clarify this for users and developers."

What exactly is he referring to? In many of the most popular (and profitable) games built for big social-networking platforms like Facebook and MySpace, players can progress faster in the game by either buying virtual goods with "real" money, or by completing offers and surveys from a partner company like the prominent Offerpal Media. Critics say that many of these offers aren't actually free, and unwittingly can sign users up for expensive subscriptions or programs.

After a public confrontation between TechCrunch's Michael Arrington and Offerpal CEO Anu Shukla at last week's Virtual Goods Summit event in San Francisco, game makers like Zynga and RockYou put out statements saying that they're cracking down on offers that are potentially misleading.

Could this lead to real industry changes? Yes. But keep in mind that Facebook, the biggest destination for these social games, already bans this stuff in theory. "Ads cannot be deceptive or fraudulent about any offer made," the company's advertising guidelines read, and adds "if an ad includes a price, discount, or 'free' offer...the destination URL for the ad must link to a page that clearly and accurately offers the exact deal the ad has displayed (and) the ad must clearly state what action or set of actions is required to qualify for the offer."

But judging by the amount of sketchiness that allegedly takes place on the platform, it seems like advertisers aren't necessarily following these guidelines. Whether MySpace's stance against them can lead to a legitimate crackdown has yet to be seen.

What's former MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe up to these days? He wants to be the next big name in the social-gaming craze, we hear.

In late July, TechCrunch floated a report that DeWolfe was hitting up big private equity outlets to amass cash, at least $100 million, for a new venture that would involve "a roll-up of an Internet industry vertical," but TechCrunch didn't specify what that sector was. Three months prior, DeWolfe had been ousted from the troubled MySpace and replaced by former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta.

Former MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe

(Credit: Michelle Meyers/CNET)

Now, several well-placed sources have told CNET News that DeWolfe intends to make a move in social gaming, a red-hot space currently dominated by the Mark Pincus-headed Zynga, and that his "roll-up" plans involve buying up a number of smaller social gaming companies so that he and Pincus can go directly head-to-head.

Multiple sources have indicated that DeWolfe is working on this new venture with Aber Whitcomb, who left his role as the News Corp.-owned MySpace's chief technology officer in late September.

We don't know what kind of progress DeWolfe, who did not reply to a request for comment, has made in securing that private equity money he was reported to be hunting for this summer. We don't know what the company's name will be--if he's settled on one yet. Nor do we know which smaller companies he wants to agglomerate.

But social games are on the brains of multiple ex-MySpace bigwigs, who were able to witness from the front lines the explosion of the industry when game developers started tapping into the viral channels on big social networks. Another MySpace executive, Jason Oberfest, left the company after just over a year to join social gaming start-up Ngmoco.

One source said that Ngmoco's valuation may already be too high for DeWolfe to consider it for his roll-up plans. Rather, DeWolfe is likely looking at very small gaming companies run by a handful of stellar developers but that lack the legal, business development, and dealmaking resources to make any kind of a dent in the current social-gaming market. He also may be looking at companies that had some initial buzz but have since seen their growth plateau or drop off.

We hear that in the months before DeWolfe's departure from MySpace, there was a lot of talk of gaming as the social site, rapidly losing ground to Facebook, attempted to refocus itself as an entertainment destination. When DeWolfe was in charge, MySpace inked a deal with casual-games maker Oberon to power a gaming platform, but that deal is no longer in place. (We've contacted Oberon for comment.)

Now, under the direction of Van Natta and several former MTV execs like Courtney Holt and Jason Hirschhorn, MySpace's "entertainment" direction is much more focused on music, and gaming has taken a back burner for the time being even though there are some hugely popular games on MySpace's developer platform.

Things couldn't be more different in the social-media industry at large, where gaming is currently front and center. While there was early on a close rivalry between two companies, SGN and Zynga, the far and away leader right now is Zynga--which is pulling in between $100 and $250 million in revenues depending on which industry blog you read, and spends tens of millions of dollars each year just buying up Facebook ads for marketing.

A few companies, like Playfish and Playdom, have also grown big (though still smaller than Zynga), and there are persistent rumors that one of them may be sold to an established gaming-industry player like Electronic Arts.

Most other companies in the space are easily several orders of magnitude smaller. Trying to make inroads when there's already a clear, formidable leader is difficult, and the economic climate means the private equity sector might be skeptical about handing a blank check to someone because he happens to have CEO experience.

What we have heard, though, is that DeWolfe already has someone to model himself on: Rupert Murdoch, the News Corp. CEO whom DeWolfe was reportedly very close to during his tenure at MySpace. With a roll-up of acquisitions, he would plan to do for the gaming industry what Murdoch did for newspapers: pluck them up across the industry, and build an empire.

Ambitious, yes.

LOS ANGELES--Already the far-and-away leader in search, Google wants to be a big player in music discovery, too.

The pop-up MySpace player that will appear when clicking the 'play' button in a Google search.

(Credit: MySpace)

The search giant teamed up with News Corp.'s MySpace and streaming service Lala for the Wednesday debut of the new Google music search feature at the historic Capitol Records building in Hollywood. With the new music search, which had been internally code-named "OneBox" when news of the project broke earlier this month, search queries pertaining to something like a song, artist, lyrics, or album will bring up links to streaming songs from iLike and MySpace, as well as links to artist information on Pandora, Imeem, and Rhapsody. The lyrics search is provided through a partnership with Gracenote.

"It is directly embedded and integrated into Google search. There's no special button to push," R.J. Pittman, director of product management for search properties, said in a phone interview with CNET News. Currently, due to licensing and availability issues, the music search is U.S.-only.

There also won't be direct download links in Google: those will be handled through Lala and MySpace. "We push all the music engagement and commerce down through the partners," Pittman said.

Additionally, if a relevant music video is available, the MySpace window that pops up when someone clicks on the "play" button in search results will display a link to that video through MySpace's new music video portal. That's interesting, considering music videos are some of the most popular content on Google's own YouTube--but YouTube video results will continue to show up independently of the new music results in Google searches.

Financial terms of the partnerships aren't yet clear. "Everyone's keeping their own revenues and we're not messing with anything," Lala founder and Chairman Bill Nguyen told CNET News. But MySpace Music President Courtney Holt was a bit more tight-lipped, saying "we're not discussing the financial details."

The MySpace deal is a little more complicated to begin with, though. Google had been in talks with music start-up iLike about integration into music search, but then iLike was acquired by MySpace in a deal that closed earlier this month. Indeed, a statement from Holt says that "this relationship was secured and implemented by the iLike team." But iLike founder Ali Partovi (who's currently on board MySpace's music team) explained that the partnership now has "MySpace branding, (and) MySpace content licensing." Through the integration of iLike's technology, it'll also have concert notifications if someone searches on Google for a band that's currently on tour.

"I think MySpace, along with (Apple's) iPod, is one of the most trusted brands in music, one of the most resonant to consumers," Partovi said. MySpace is also reported to be in talks with Microsoft to power a music feature on MSN.

Music search is something that Google could really dominate. According to traffic firm Experian Hitwise, 6 percent of Google's top 1,000 search-related terms deal with music, and already 30 percent of traffic to sites that Hitwise classifies under the "music" umbrella comes from Google.

Considering Google's reach, it's a big win for both MySpace, currently struggling to redefine itself as a pop culture powerhouse rather than a social network through its MySpace Music service, a joint venture with major and independent record labels, and Lala, which also has a new song-gifting deal with Facebook. "We think (Google's music search) going to have a thousand percent increase in our sales, an order of magnitude more," Lala's Nguyen told CNET News.

This also means that music-related search results are getting a sheen of legitimacy on Google. With official partnerships, Google's most prominent music search results will be from sites that have licensing deals in place with the major labels, rather than potentially pirated content. Google's history with the music industry is spotty at best: it's had to strike its own deals with the major record labels, and relations haven't always been positive. Music search puts it all into order, partners in the deal say.

"Instead of ending up with a pirate site and a page with a bunch of ads or random lyrics sites, you wind up with a play button," Nguyen said.

Updated 4:30 p.m. Just after Google and Lala made the announcement official (in what was probably not a coincidence) Yahoo released a blog post designed to point out that they've been offering this kind of music search for a while. "We've made it easier to find music videos, artist information, and play full length songs from within the search results page. This is just one of the many ways Yahoo! is enhancing the search experience for music lovers," said Larry Cornett, vice president of consumer products for Yahoo Search.

Sound the alarms! The U.K.'s Telegraph news outlet has a story that seems to prove the unthinkable: that onetime social-networking rivals Facebook and MySpace could actually be working on some kind of partnership.

Two years ago this would've been a huge deal. Now? I'm really not surprised.

"The move could potentially see MySpace music and video footage being shared on Facebook via its Connect platform, which allows people to log into third-party sites using their Facebook ID," the article by Emma Barnett explains.

It then quotes Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg as saying that "we would like to have (MySpace's) content, as we already do with many other sites, shared across our network because it is good for our users" and that "we are open to working with MySpace and are in talks with them at the moment."

MySpaces CEO Owen Van Natta, who used to have a similar role at Facebook to the one that Sandberg does now, is likewise quoted as saying "we are in talks with Facebook, and other sites, about how we could partner with them."

See, here's the deal. Sandberg and Van Natta are quoted in pretty ambiguous terms. But any third-party company on the Web is at liberty to implement Facebook's log-in standard with the Facebook Connect API: over 15,000 sites had, at last count. The catch with MySpace is that both sites are so large, they'd naturally be in some kind of talks about it simply to handle infrastructure issues (and likely more). The Huffington Post, for example, struck a deal with Facebook to power its "Social News" feature with Facebook Connect rather than just to chuck in some Facebook Connect code.

Partnering with Facebook is actually excellent positioning for MySpace, because the News Corp.-owned social site has been attempting to differentiate itself from pure social networking: a game that Facebook has clearly won. By hinting that it could strike a deal with Facebook, MySpace is putting out a major "we're different" message as it tries to establish itself as a pop culture hub. Facebook's the one providing the platform for the content; MySpace is the one providing the content itself.

For Facebook, meanwhile, you could take this as a "look, we've won" move. After all, it's a validation of the power of the social network's content platform that a company like MySpace--which used to dwarf Facebook in size--would want to use it for distribution.

SAN FRANCISCO--With both MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta and News Corp. chief digital officer Jonathan Miller taking the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit this week, there was naturally plenty of talk about the social site's attempt to reverse its ill fortune of late. Once the biggest name in social networking, it's long since lost that title to Facebook and is trying to reinvent itself as a destination for music and entertainment.

"I think that what you see in the space more than anything else is if you don't keep innovating and moving forward you get in trouble," Miller said in his talk on Thursday morning. "You can't stop, you have to keep going, and (MySpace) didn't keep going, it kind of stopped."

And in that time, he added, "we had two fantastic competitors emerge in Facebook and Twitter."

The previous day, Van Natta made his first big appearance on the conference circuit since he joined MySpace and was tasked with a major turnaround. Van Natta unveiled a new music video hub as well as an enhanced set of marketing tools for music artists--some of which were built in with technology from iLike, which MySpace acquired this summer.

And on Wednesday night, the "new" MySpace was out in full form: a line snaked down three city blocks when music fans caught wind of the fact that the company had booked rock band Weezer for one of its "secret shows" concerts.

"MySpace started with an essence around certain things, and one of them was music, and meeting new people," Miller, a former AOL exec who also joined News Corp. this spring, said on Thursday. "We're going back to basics in that sense, but you've got to make it relevant to today and going forward."

It's obviously too early to tell whether the "reinvention" will work. Some critics say that it's too big of a task, especially given the state of the advertising market. But Miller spent a big portion of his talk at the Web 2.0 Summit hyping up the Fox Audience Network, or FAN, the digital advertising division that News Corp. first announced last spring.

"We kind of broke it out of MySpace and gave it a life of its own," Miller said. "We're just at the beginning of a coming-out party for FAN."

FAN just inked a deal with agency giant Omnicom, and more are on the way, he added. Miller also said FAN is the fifth-largest ad network on the Web, after the usual suspects--Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL--and that it's hoping to get into fourth place soon.

SAN FRANCISCO--He's not kidding about making changes.

MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta took the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit event on Wednesday and paraded out a whole slew of announcements related to turning the flagging social network into a music and media powerhouse. He showed off a massive catalog of music videos--coming from all the partners in the MySpace Music joint venture--and an enhanced set of tools for bands using the site as a marketing and promotional hub. Plus, the MySpace Music service now syncs up with Apple's iTunes, not just Amazon MP3.

It was former Facebook exec Van Natta's first big public appearance since becoming CEO of the News Corp.-owned MySpace in April.

The "artist dashboard" for MySpace Music is a free product that offers a suite of analytics for bands and artists that operate MySpace profiles so that they can get details on who's listening and interacting with them within the MySpace community. It's also baked in features from iLike, the music service that MySpace acquired this summer. iLike operates social apps on a variety of platforms, including Facebook, and artists using MySpace can now access that data too.

"We're giving people things like geographic breakdowns, where exactly their friends are not just in the U.S. but in the world," Van Natta explained. "This is literally getting pushed live as I'm sitting here talking to you."

For the fans, there's the music video portal, which started rolling out on Wednesday, offering the entire catalog of music videos from all the labels that offer their music on the MySpace Music streaming service. It'll compete with Vevo, the Universal Music Group-founded music video hub that features YouTube-created technology and investment backing from Abu Dhabi oil money. But it sounds like Universal's music videos will be on MySpace, too.

CNET News reported earlier this month that MySpace was working with video hub Hulu--in which News Corp. is a stakeholder--to launch a new video service. It's unclear whether there is any connection to the new music video hub.

MySpace launched the MySpace Music operation last year and hired former MTV executive Courtney Holt to head it up. But things haven't been altogether sunny. Earlier this year, word got out that the major labels who've put a stake in MySpace Music were dissatisfied with its performance.

Plus, earlier on Wednesday, it came to light that rival Facebook was making its first big move in the music space. The massive social network announced a partnership with music service Lala as part of its revamped virtual gifts marketplace, allowing members to buy songs for one another.

Van Natta shrugged off concerns that MySpace, with a significant portion of its traffic eaten away by Facebook's rocketing growth, is having trouble pulling in advertising revenues.

"We're really good at monetization," he assured the audience. "There's a lot of different avenues that we can take."

This post was expanded at 4:54 p.m. PT.

I'm not an employee of MySpace, but I was able to join its Facebook network.

(Credit: Facebook)

I do not work for MySpace. But my Facebook profile now says I do, thanks to what appears to be a sneaky little flaw in MySpace's recently launched e-mail client.

Professional networks on Facebook are intended to be limited to employees, and require a corporate e-mail address to which Facebook sends a confirmation e-mail to verify accuracy. But when MySpace launched MySpace Mail this summer, it made e-mail addresses with the myspace.com domain--which is also used internally for corporate e-mail--available to any members of the News Corp.-owned social network.

A reader tipped off CNET News to the hack, which requires a little bit of HTML know-how. We're not going to give detailed instructions out of the interest of MySpace employees' own security--and it looks like Facebook has put a fix in place, because when a CNET colleague used a MySpace Mail address to register around 2:40 p.m. PT on Wednesday, he was informed that the address was invalid.

See what happens?

(Credit: Facebook)

In vague terms, it looks like MySpace was aware of the fact that members might try to register for its network on Facebook, because the confirmation link to Facebook does not work in MySpace Mail, nor does copy-pasting it. Basically, it's mangled somehow. But, the tipster explained, the real link is still in the page's HTML source. And indeed, I was able to join MySpace's network on Facebook.

This does have security implications, because many Facebook members limit some of their profile data to people who went to their schools or work for the same company--Facebook first launched corporate networks in the spring of 2005. Many may display their cell phone numbers, photo albums, or home addresses only to college alumni or co-workers.

It's an issue for Facebook as well because the massive social site does have an obligation to make sure that its restricted networks don't lie fallow. If there's a change in corporate e-mail structure at a company with a Facebook network, particularly a big one, that can mean something big with regard to potentially thousands of Facebook members' security.

A MySpace representative told CNET News that the company was looking into the matter and would be able to comment soon.

This post was updated at 2:44 p.m. PT on Wednesday to note that the problem appears to have been corrected by Facebook.

Hot on the heels of its appointment of a chief technology officer last week, News Corp.'s MySpace on Monday announced that Mark Rosenbaum has been hired as its chief financial officer.

Although the appointment marks the first time that the social network has had a CFO, it is Rosenbaum's second stint at News Corp. He headed up financial operations at Gemstar-TV Guide International, when it was owned by the Rupert Murdoch-helmed conglomerate. More recently, Rosenbaum served as a consultant to MGM.

Mark Rosenbaum's MySpace profile picture.

(Credit: MySpace)

In his new position, Rosenbaum report directly to Owen Van Natta, the former Facebook executive who became MySpace's CEO in April, after the departure of co-founder Chris DeWolfe.

Less than two months after Van Natta's hiring, MySpace announced a layoff of nearly 30 percent amid stagnant growth and what was increasingly a losing battle against Facebook in its quest for social-networking dominance. The company called its aim at financial efficiency a "return to start-up culture."

Hiring a chief financial officer is, as a result, a logical step.

"Having led companies at every stage of their development, Mark understands both start-up culture and mature businesses, and is well-suited to guide MySpace's financial organization through its next phase of growth," Van Natta said in a release announcing Rosenbaum's hire. "We're thrilled to add someone with his pedigree and experience to the team."