The Social

MySpace has appointed Alex Maghen to the role of chief technology officer, the News Corp.-owned social site announced Tuesday. He replaces outgoing CTO Aber Whitcomb, who had been at the company since its inception.

Maghen was already at MySpace, serving in the CTO position of its MySpace Music division, a joint venture with the major record labels. Prior to that, he held CTO roles at Yahoo Entertainment and MTV Networks--the latter of which was also the former employer of current MySpace entertainment execs Courtney Holt and Jason Hirschhorn.

"The next phase of MySpace's evolution will further empower our incredible audience of consumers, developers, artists, content creators, and advertisers with the tools they need to broadcast, discover, and express themselves," Maghen said in a release. "The future of our technology organization will be guided by an open platform and world-class standards to create a place of invention for our technical staff as well as the world's development community."

MySpace has fallen out of the tech industry's favor, surpassed both in traffic and technological innovation by once-smaller rival Facebook--even though MySpace advocated developer-friendly open standards well before Facebook came out in full support of them.

There have been some promising signs of late on the technology front: a MySpace-Twitter status sync proved popular enough to make MySpace's URL shortener the second most popular on the microblogging service.

A security hole in OAuth, the open-source protocol that acts as a "valet key" for users' log-in information, has led services like Twitter and Yahoo to temporarily pull their support, CNET News has learned.

Some developers were dismayed when Twitter pulled its support for OAuth, which it had only recently started to implement: blogger Jesse Stay wrote in a post about other restrictions to Twitter's developer API that its removal of OAuth is one of a number of recent examples of how the microblogging service has "pulled the rug out from under its developers."

In the interest of online safety, CNET News has chosen not to make the details of the security hole public. Here are the basics: The hole makes it possible for a hacker to use social-engineering tactics to trick users into exposing their data. The OAuth protocol itself requires tweaking to remove the vulnerability, and a source close to OAuth's development team said that there have been no known violations, that it has been aware of it for a few days now, and has been coordinating responses with vendors. A solution should be announced soon.

This is a particularly big deal for Twitter, as OAuth prevents users of a service from having to hand over their passwords to third-party services that use that service's application program interface (API), and Twitter relies heavily on developer-created enhancements to the service from clients like Twhirl and TweetDeck to statistics and analytics applications.

"OAuth is still in beta, for what it's worth," Twitter API lead Alex Payne said in (of course) a Twitter message on Wednesday. "We should have the current issue with it resolved soon."

Eran Hammer-Lahav, the OAuth community coordinator for this specific threat, spoke to CNET News later on Wednesday afternoon. "We have been aware of this threat for about a week now, and we have been coordinating with all known providers to help them understand the threat and deploy whatever mitigating factors they can," Hammer-Lahav said, adding that full details will be made available on the OAuth Web site at midnight Pacific time on Thursday. "There are no known exploits of this, so there are no reported attacks and the providers have either already deployed matters to address this or are doing it right now."

He highlighted Twitter's role in helping to keep things on the down-low at its own expense; when the service disabled OAuth, it did not mention that there was a security hole at its root.

"The community is extremely grateful to Twitter, despite the fact that they have been standing alone in the line of fire and taking the heat for this threat as if it was their own issue," Hammer-Lahav explained. "They basically took the PR hit in order to allow other companies to address it. They were doing it not to protect themselves, but to protect other companies."

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone responded to the threat on the company blog: "We take security seriously and felt the responsible thing to do was temporarily disable OAuth while this matter was sorted out. Yahoo and others made similar decisions," Stone wrote. "The developers working on Twitter projects that are in our beta test group felt this disruption the hardest and their patience is extremely appreciated."

This post was last expanded at 1:36 p.m. PT.

MySpace's sidebar slides out on the screen of a Widget Channel-compatible TV.

(Credit: MySpace)

We've heard a bit now about the Widget Channel, the partnership between Intel and Yahoo designed to bring Web functions like photo sharing and stock prices to living room TV sets. Well, MySpace is one of the partners on board: the News Corp.-owned social network has created a "widget for TV" that lets its members access a variety of features from Widget Channel-compatible TVs.

Basically, this means that you can install a MySpace widget in the Widget Channel "dock," and expand it in order to access profiles, status updates, in-box messages, and other site features. The widget was created, MySpace said, with the MySpaceID project that sprung out of its Data Availability initiative late last year.

So it's more or less MySpace on your TV. But that makes sense--with competitor Facebook having more or less bested it on the networking front, MySpace has begun to establish itself more as a media portal. The TV widget could potentially make for some cool developments in the future. MySpace Music playlists, for example, could make a nice addition to the home entertainment center.

And MySpace hopes this will only be the start of further off-the-PC endeavors. A release Wednesday hinted at a future presence on devices like DVD players and set-top boxes. And MySpace has also been ramping up its mobile offerings--the last development, which we heard about a month ago, was streaming video.

Yang (left) and Battelle on Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET News)

SAN FRANCISCO--This hasn't been the best year for a lot of people in the tech industry. But nobody can argue that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang hasn't had a particularly rough time.

"Jerry Yang has had a tough nine months," Web 2.0 Summit host John Battelle of Federated Media said as he introduced the CEO for a talk at the conference here on Wednesday, and went on to list some of his company's much-documented woes. Yang, in a blue blazer and white checkered shirt, slouching a bit in his chair, replied, "That's quite an intro."

But it was still an understatement. Yang took the stage at the high-profile industry conference on the same day that Google announced it was walking away from a 10-year search-advertising deal with Yahoo, which would have brought the beleaguered Sunnyvale, Calif.-based dot-com hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, due to antitrust concerns. Battelle said that, due to the situation, before the talk started that he'd gotten calls from multiple reporters wondering if Yang would actually show up.

But he did, and he was defiant. "I don't regret any minute of what happened," Yang said. "Because I've been there the whole time, it's a part of me and some people say that's great and some people say 'well, you're just too close to it.'"

Even though Battelle, moderating the "conversation," brought up just about every ghost from Yahoo's recent past--from the "peanut butter memo" to the Microsoft takeover debacle to corporate raider Carl Icahn's attempt to shake things up--the talk proved less than electrifying. The CEO kept driving home a single point: that Yahoo is a growing company and that he fully expects it to weather the storm regardless of the situation.

"I certainly didn't expect the year to be what it's been, coming into it, but I think that the environment which we are in today is extraordinary," Yang said. "I think what Yahoo's been through in 2008 has been extraordinary."

Video: Jerry Yang at Web 2.0 Summit (courtesy of TechWeb)

The problem with the Microsoft deal, he said, was that it was the wrong deal for the two companies. "To this day, I have to say that the best thing for Microsoft to do is to buy Yahoo. I don't think that is a bad idea at all...at the right price, whatever the price is, we are willing to sell the company," he explained. "We were ready to negotiate, we wanted to negotiate a deal, and we felt that we weren't that far apart. But at the end of the day, they withdrew and they since have been very clear about not wanting to buy the company."

In a joking reference to the fact that Yahoo may not get within striking distance of the share price Microsoft was willing to buy it for any time soon, Battelle exclaimed, "Why didn't you take the $33 a share, Jerry?" Indeed, some pundits think that Microsoft may show a renewed interest now that Yahoo has been (arguably) sufficiently battered to make it bargain-basement cheap. The catalyst, of course, is the disintegration of the Google deal.

"Google clearly decided that they did not want to stay in the deal, and we're disappointed with that," was Yang's take on it.

He encouraged Battelle--and the audience--to focus on the innovation, not the bad press. Namely, he meant the company's restructuring (or "rewiring," as they seem to prefer) into a developer-friendly open platform. When Battelle asked him if Yahoo was just jumping on the "platform" bandwagon kick-started by Facebook a year and a half ago, Yang replied, "It's very different from Facebook because what people go to Facebook for is very different from why they go to Yahoo."

The other light at the end of the tunnel, as detailed by Yang, is APT, the upcoming advertising product that's such a big deal for the company that they enlisted Mad Men star Jon Hamm, who plays a fictional advertising exec on TV, to help them pitch the product.

"I think that advertising is still fairly early in its development on the Internet, and I know it's a $40 billion industry and everyone talks about it as a large mature industry," Yang said. "But our view has been that the real sort of endpoint for advertising, the real vision for advertising is being able to really take advertisers and advertising offers and being able to map them against consumer needs, consumer desires in a way that is seamless, sort of one big marketplace."

Though he remained characteristically quiet and soft-spoken, Yang made it clear that he, along with the rest of Yahoo, wants to be seen as a fighter.

"The Yahoo story that hasn't really been told, and what we've had to execute in order to do it, is we do believe we're innovating, we do believe we're changing, we do believe we're changing the game," Yang said. "My personal belief is if you're not in the game to win, you shouldn't be in the game, and that's the way that I try to encourage the whole company to think about."

Another high-level Yahoo employee has left the building: Valeh Vakili, director of U.S. sales operations, will join News Corp.'s MySpace as senior vice president of sales strategy and operations.

At Yahoo, Vakili was in charge of integrating the sales teams from acquired properties like Right Media into Yahoo's own; at MySpace she will be in charge of the social network's account management team. Vakili will remain based in New York. (MySpace's headquarters are in Los Angeles.)

Yahoo's "executive exodus" has been well-documented, with dwindling search share and a disastrous takeover bid from Microsoft dampening employee morale.

MySpace announced in July the hiring of five new vice presidents, two of whom came from Yahoo--but at the same time underwent company layoffs. Statistics firm ComScore reported in June that MySpace had, ironically, surpassed Yahoo as the biggest destination for display ads on the Web.

Jon Hamm in a promotional still from 'Mad Men.'

(Credit: AMC)

NEW YORK--When Yahoo finally debuted its display-ad platform in a press conference here on Wednesday, CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker had an unusual guest on hand: actor Jon Hamm, who plays 1960s-era advertising exec Don Draper on the critically acclaimed drama Mad Men.

"I do feel a little strange being up in front of a group of people, in front of cameras, talking about advertising, instead of smoking nine cigarettes and drinking three or four glasses of Scotch," Hamm said, referring to Draper's hard-living attitude, "although maybe if this was a little later in the day we could do that."

It might seem odd for Yahoo to unveil a new product with an actor famous for playing a fictional figure on the Madison Avenue of four dozen years ago. But Mad Men, which won an Emmy Award on Sunday for Best Drama, is a wild hit in New York's media and advertising circles, and that's who Yahoo is trying to court. They're the ones whom Yahoo has to convince that its new ad platform, called APT, will make their lives and jobs easier.

"Today's digital advertising process is broken," Decker said in the press conference, part of the fifth annual New York Advertising Week festivities. "As we see it, we count more than 30 different operational steps, 30, from a time that an ad is conceived to the time that it runs on a publisher's site and is optimized for their strategy."

Actor Jon Hamm, star of AMC's 'Mad Men,' speaking at a press conference unveiling Yahoo's new APT platform.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)

APT hopes to solve those problems. It's a Web-based product that aims for a smoother and more efficient ad-buying process with a drag-and-drop interface, simple analytics, and all-in-one client "dashboard." Geared toward not just advertisers, but also digital publishers, media companies, ad networks, and agencies, the technology uses multiple kinds of targeting--geographic, demographic, and behavioral--to achieve what Yahoo says will be the best possible destination for graphical ads with a minimal amount of work.

"We challenged ourselves to make the whole process of doing business in the digital world easier, more transparent, and more profitable," Yang said of APT's development. "APT from Yahoo is all about spending less time managing digital advertising and spending more time delivering business results.

Yahoo first began to talk about this extensive display-ad strategy in April, then calling the product AMP. On Wednesday, the company announced that the re-named APT's first clients are two Bay Area newspapers, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News.

Both publications are already part of Yahoo's Newspaper Consortium, which is an ad network for participating media companies. APT will become available to other Newspaper Consortium partners over the course of the rest of the year and into 2009, followed by other clients in the publisher, advertiser, and agency sectors. Also in 2009, Yahoo's own ad industry will shift to the APT platform.

Yang said that APT's genesis is rooted in the company's relationship with Right Media, an advertising exchange start-up that Yahoo acquired last year after initially purchasing a 20 percent stake in 2006. "That move really also enabled us a core foundational network technology that's going to be able to be part of this new system that we're announcing today," he explained.

But, he said, it was the Newspaper Consortium that really sparked the demand. "(Members were) telling us (of) the need for a far more robust digital advertising platform," Yang said. "It was becoming far more difficult for them to find the exact audiences, it was taking them too much time to find them if they found them at all, and they needed to be more effectively monetizing their inventory in the digital world."

One member of the consortium was on hand to testify on Yahoo's behalf: Dean Singleton, president of the MediaNews Group, which owns the Mercury News. "We are launching a new era with this extraordinary platform, APT from Yahoo, which will drive a sea change in how we operate as newspapers and capture opportunities," said Singleton, who also serves as publisher of the Denver Post and Salt Lake Tribune.

But APT won't be without competition. AOL has amassed its own ad service, Platform-A, out of a number of start-up acquisitions, and earlier this week announced the addition of an ad exchange called BidPlace to the platform. Google, the digital-ad leader that has spooked Madison Avenue, is still best known for its text ads but has made move after move to court industries like television, radio, and newspapers.

And with its aggressive focus on display advertising, some may see the beleaguered Yahoo's move as effectively conceding the search ad market to rival Google; the two have, in fact, partnered in a controversial deal that followed Yahoo's failed acquisition negotiations with Microsoft. It would pull in more revenue for Yahoo, but it would also further cement Google's position as the clear industry leader.

Since Google hasn't yet cornered display advertising as effectively, and the landscape now consists of dozens of different ad networks, Yahoo sees opportunity with APT. Bringing along the dashing Jon Hamm, speaking just as suavely as his Don Draper alter ego, couldn't hurt. In his address to the audience, Hamm drew parallels between the digital advertising revolution and the challenges faced by the Mad Men characters as they dealt with the explosion of television advertising in the early 1960s. Today, the ad industry needs to adapt to a climate that demands innovative, straight-to-consumer marketing and up-to-the-minute delivery.

"In 1960, New York City alone had eight daily newspapers. Every significant daily had offices around the world, and print journalists were the rock stars of their day," Hamm said. "Today we see Arnold Schwarzenegger announcing his California gubernatorial candidacy on Leno, and Barack Obama announcing his vice presidential candidate, Joe Biden, by text message."

"Don Draper knew how to connect," Hamm continued. "He'd recognize that what my friend Jerry Yang is about to share with you will rock the advertising world in the same way that radio and television did way back when."

For an industry that's become captivated with the alluring Mad Men, that just might be enough of a pitch.

Let's hope Yahoo has finally learned that the maxim "If you build it, they will come" simply does not apply to a social network.

The Silicon Valley mainstay and onetime Microsoft shopping-spree target is quietly shutting down Yahoo Mash, its latest foray into creating a general-interest social network like a Facebook or MySpace.

It's the latest social-networking failure for Yahoo, which was unable to get its earlier "Yahoo 360" network off the ground, and once attempted to purchase Facebook, only to have its billion-dollar offer turned down.

Mash was cute, with a slick interface, and Yahoo already had the advantage of millions of registered users to roll right into it. But its failure to catch on is indicative of a bigger truth in the social-networking world: a new player in this saturated market has to offer something legitimately new and useful.

Yes, really. And let it be a lesson to any other would-be Facebook killers.

Critics of social networks say they're nothing but gimmicky fads, pointing to the popularity of silly Facebook applications and the flashy glitter text that adorns many teenagers' MySpace profiles. That just isn't true: if you look at the two biggest social-networking success stories, Facebook and MySpace, each one has served a distinct utility since its debut.

People initially signed up for MySpace because it offered unprecedented tools for independent bands to spread the word about their music--and ways for fans to keep track of those bands. Facebook gained popularity because, in its infancy, it was the digital version of a college directory.

Other broad-reaching social networks that have seen decent growth have either targeted a large demographic--Bebo and under-25s, for example--or have achieved localized success in regions of the world that hadn't yet caught the social-networking bug, like Hi5 in Latin America.

Even still, they have to differentiate themselves: Bebo, which has been acquired by AOL, touts its library of original video programming. Hi5 recently launched a mobile site that it hopes will make it appealing to consumers who don't regularly use a personal computer.

In the days of AOL People Connection, the novelty factor of creating a profile and giving yourself an identity online was enough. But a decade later, filling out an online profile is about as interesting as filing tax forms.

If Yahoo, or any other aspiring Facebook rival, wants to take social networking seriously, it has to give its millions of users a reason to create profiles and connect with friends. Virtual pets that your friends can "snorgle" are not a reason. Neither are drag-and-drop widgets--that's something that could draw people to a personal home page service, not a social network.

Here's a thought: Yahoo would've done better in the social-networking market to introduce a friends list and news feed option to its members' Yahoo.com home pages rather than attempting to create a standalone service. That way, it wouldn't have to change existing members' browsing habits one bit.

There are plenty of compelling properties at Yahoo's fingertips: imagine if a feed on Yahoo's home page told you which of your contacts were uploading Flickr photos, RSVPing to events on Upcoming, or voting up news stories on Yahoo Buzz.

Look at Google: its social network, Orkut, is big in Brazil and India but not globally. Instead of trying to push Orkut into markets that are already saturated by competing social networks, Google has quietly been tying together existing properties into a more social experience.

Just this week, Google announced the addition of a "following" feature to blog platform Blogger, and it invited users to import the list of Blogger-hosted blogs they subscribe into its Google Reader RSS software so that they can read them alongside other blogs. Google Calendar's collaborative datebooks have been tied into the Gmail client. And when developer applications became the craze du jour, Google developed standards like OpenSocial and the forthcoming Friend Connect for other social networks to deploy.

To be fair, Google has had its share of social-networking blunders: it acquired mobile where-you-at service Dodgeball and failed to find a niche for it within the company, instead letting it wither on the vine. It's also still unclear as to what Google will do with Jaiku, the Twitter-like start-up that it acquired last year, and the likes of OpenSocial and Friend Connect are still too early-stage to deem them surefire successes.

Regardless, what's important is that Google seems to understand that there isn't room in the market to debut and promote a mass-appeal social network. With the demise of Mash, perhaps Yahoo gets the point now too. But while Mash likely wasn't a resource or cash drain in the end, Yahoo is now on the PR defensive.

And, goodness knows, it doesn't need any more of that.

My Yahoo Mash profile, soon to get euthanized.

(Credit: Yahoo)

File this one under the "ouch" category. Yahoo is shutting down its social-networking experiment, Yahoo Mash, after only a year in business.

An e-mail to Mash members from Yahoo community manager Matt Warburton read, "Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun with it. Please note that we will shut down Mash on September 29, 2008. As a result, your current profile on Mash will no longer be available."

Mash didn't really offer anything new, other than the fact that instead of inviting friends you created profiles for them and then invited them to customize and change them. You could also add "modules," a sort of rudimentary version of social-network apps. It was designed as a quirky, cute step up from Yahoo 360, the social network that Yahoo had based off its millions of pre-existing user accounts; if Yahoo 360 was analogous to AOL profiles, Mash was more like Facebook.

But Mash never caught on, and its parent company has now deemed it worth closing.

This is not the first time that Yahoo has launched an experimental social network only to yank it. Last year, Yahoo shut down a Dodgeball- or Brightkite-like mobile social site called "Mixd" that had only been in operation for a few months.

Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, who left the Yahoo-acquired company in June, has a new gig. She posted on her blog on Wednesday that she'll be joining a stealthy New York-based start-up, Hunch, as "Chief Product Officer, board member, and resident Facebook app skeptic."

So what is Hunch? That's under the radar, but we're hearing from a well-placed source that it's a recommendation engine that uses "collective crowd intelligence." That doesn't sound too original, but our source hinted that the technology behind it is pretty top-notch. It's still under development, but when Hunch is finished, it will presumably be able to provide recommendations on just about anything or everything. (Hence the name "Hunch.")

What Fake did say: that she won't be relocating to New York, but will spend a lot of time there; that her husband and Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield isn't involved; that Hunch invites will start to go out in the fall; and that she still doesn't find much time to sleep.