MySpace announced Monday a twofold partnership with Microsoft: first, a MySpace mobile application for Windows Mobile phones, and second, support for Microsoft's Silverlight technology in the News Corp.-owned social network's developer platform.
The Windows Mobile application will be available this summer for Windows Mobile 6.1 phones and then more broadly in the fall. It'll be preloaded on Windows Mobile phones manufactured by LG, too. The app joins existing MySpace mobile products for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Sidekick, Palm, and Nokia handsets.
As for the Silverlight announcement, this means that developers building applications for MySpace's platform--which is based on the Google-created OpenSocial standard--have access to Adobe Flash competitor.
The announcements themselves are fairly mundane. But here's what's really interesting: Microsoft has invested $240 million in Facebook, which was at one point the second-place name in social networking--behind MySpace. But while MySpace still has more users in the U.S., Facebook is now significantly bigger worldwide.
In recent months, perhaps as a reaction to Facebook's explosive growth and domination of the social-networking landscape, MySpace has been making numerous efforts to return to its roots as a music and media hub.
Microsoft announced Thursday it has made plans to acquire MobiComp, a mobile-data company founded in 2000
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. MobiComp, which is based in Braga, Portugal, will become part of Microsoft's Mobile Communications Business division.
The acquisition will be used to bolster a number of services on the Windows Mobile smartphone platform as well as the Windows Live Web services division.
MobiComp has developed an array of products: MobileKeeper Backup & Restore, MobileKeeper Sharing & Communities, and Active mTicker. They're used by companies to back up data stored on mobile phones, submit content from mobile phones to social networks like Facebook, and access news and other mobile media.
"People expect their phones to deliver the best experiences from PCs and the Web right to their pockets," Todd Peters, Microsoft's corporate vice president for its Mobile Communications Business, said in a release Thursday. "Investing in the right solutions from companies like MobiComp will extend the capabilities of Windows Mobile and Windows Live to help us provide the most innovative and seamless way to stay connected."
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