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Needless to say, MySpace is in a bit of a tight spot. The News Corp.-owned social network has been eclipsed in traffic by Facebook worldwide and may be close to losing its top spot in the U.S. And now, a management shakeup initiated by new News Corp. digital boss Jonathan Miller has seen the departure of CEO Chris DeWolfe and shuffling of president Tom Anderson's role.

Entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, who sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL when Miller was in charge over there, came up with a list of ten priorities for the incoming CEO. He's mostly … Read more

iLike, a social music service that has created one of the more popular applications for Facebook's platform, has changed the app's name to the more straightforward "Music."

"Over 40 million music fans like you have used iLike to share music and discover concerts, and we're grateful to you for being one of them," an e-mail sent to members who have installed the app said. "To maintain consistency with other Facebook applications, we're renaming the 'iLike' application to simply 'Music.'"

The company name hasn't changed, and it hasn't yet … Read more

Updated at 6:15 p.m. PDT with correct list of companies that have signed on to test the software.

After it made headlines last week for yet another executive leaving the company, you'd really think things couldn't get much worse for virtual world Second Life and its parent company Linden Lab.

The marketing hype--it's the next Internet!--bottomed out long ago. There was a wave of unflattering press, from virtual terrorism to technical problems to banking scandals. Even the NBC sitcom "The Office" jumped on board, lambasting Second Life with an episode in … Read more

From what it looks like, the fresh, real-time streaming redesign of social aggregator FriendFeed is getting some accolades from already-avid users--but might not sway the masses.

Among existing FriendFeed loyalists, it doesn't look like there's much dissent about the redesign, which is currently available as a beta test. An "anti-FriendFeed beta version" group hasn't gotten much traction. But on Twitter, which some people see as a FriendFeed complement and others as a competitor, opinions were much more mixed.

"I have (Twitter client) TweetDeck to filter and organize noise. Why then would I still need … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Stepping off an otherwise quiet street and through the door of the downtown restaurant Roe on Thursday night was, at first, like a foray into a secret fantasy world where no market crash or economic recession had ever happened.

It was the launch party for Yola.com, a rebranded Web publishing platform formerly known as SynthaSite, in conjunction with this week's Web 2.0 Expo down the street at the Moscone convention center. There was an open bar, of course: The signature cocktail was a kir royale, a blend of champagne and blackcurrant liqueur, so champagne flutes were … Read more

These days, in this world of IKEA and Target and "Project Runway," we like to think we know about design. We also like to think that the biggest names in Silicon Valley know what they're doing design-wise.

Yet recently, we saw two of the Web's most prominent players hit by design-related snafus: first, the continuing brouhaha over Facebook's latest home page redesign, which many users claim makes the service more difficult to use; and second, the departure of Douglas Bowman, a high-ranking Google designer who accompanied his resignation with a blog post detailing his frustration … Read more

On Tuesday night, a Los Angeles Times blog post pointed to an soundbite that Facebook "gaming guru" Gareth Davis produced at the GamesBeat conference in San Francisco: that the company is "looking at" offering a virtual currency to developers. The virtual goods industry, the article notes, is a $1.5 billion behemoth.

This would mean that games and other apps with a presence on Facebook could use a universal "Facebook currency" that would not only be interoperable between apps, it could also line Facebook's pockets with some extra cash. But Davis' language ("… Read more

So, about two dozen high-profile and quasi-high-profile young business leaders were invited to Washington, D.C., to meet with senior Obama administration officials Friday to discuss the future of the ravaged U.S. economy. And I've got to respect the fact that the administration wants to hear from young, outside-the-box entrepreneurs. But, of course, the dial on the snark machine has been turned up to 11.

I don't have a complete list of attendees, but we've learned through various channels that the roster includes Kluster founder Ben Kaufman, Zappos founder Tony Hsieh, Toms Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie, … Read more

The future will be streamed. And streamed some more.

Earlier this week, Facebook unveiled a few notable product revamps: "fan pages" for brands that look and act more like regular member profiles, and a redesigned home page that emphasizes a real-time version of the site's iconic news feed. The keyword here is "streaming," encouraging an even more extensive flow of information with a status update prompt that asks, "What's on your mind?"

Needless to say, "What's on your mind"--which also allows the posting of links, videos, and other … Read more