The Social

(Credit: MySpace)

MySpace unveiled its new messaging system late on Thursday night--which now lets members use the formerly internal service to e-mail others from an @myspace.com account--and the reactions have been pretty positive. Since it's slowing rolling out in beta over the next few weeks, hands-on reviews are hard to come by, but the design looks pretty good and people seem to agree that it may help reverse some of the site's well-publicized traffic stagnation.

Here are the numbers: MySpace says that nearly a fifth of its traffic is related to the messaging platform, and it has 130 million users worldwide. MySpace Mail can therefore enter the market as the fourth largest e-mail provider in the world and the second biggest in the U.S. It also gives the News Corp.-owned social network a leg up on Facebook, which has eclipsed it in traffic but still has a pretty rudimentary messaging system. (That's apparently going to change, from what everyone's been saying.)

MySpace Mail, in tune with its media-savvy young audience, has made it easier than other e-mail clients to attach music, video, and picture files. Additionally, if you're contacting another MySpace member, an activity feed of that member's recent MySpace goings-on will appear in the right sidebar. Those are features that I wouldn't be surprised to see other e-mail clients start integrating in the future.

But will MySpace Mail shake up the industry? I don't think so.

The question for MySpace is uptake. The majority of its users likely already have other e-mail addresses that they already use, and switching over may be a complicated matter: the hassle of changing address books, not to mention updating e-mail list and account subscriptions, means that people just don't change their addresses very often. And it doesn't have the invite-only allure or the power of a name like Google behind it that Gmail had when it launched in 2004.

Security's also an issue, given how well-publicized MySpace spam and worms have been over the years. The company says it is using "leading anti-spam technology and virus scanning" in the overhauled messaging client.

So, according to PaidContent, MySpace is about to upgrade its messaging service to full-out Web mail: so that instead of only being able to communicate with other MySpace members, users will have an @myspace.com e-mail address. This will start rolling out on Thursday, apparently, with the new service available to all MySpace members by the end of the year.

This seems a little odd at first, considering we recently heard that the troubled MySpace was more or less giving up on trying to compete with Facebook, and was attempting to rebrand as an "entertainment portal." Launching a new tech-related product doesn't seem to fit into that, unless you consider that (according to PaidContent) this has been in development since before the management shakeup that saw Owen Van Natta replacing Chris DeWolfe as MySpace CEO, and brought in former AOL exec Jon Miller as the head of parent company News Corp.'s digital operations.

But here's a thought: I wonder how much the focus of "MySpace Mail" will be geared toward bands and artists who want a better way to manage and communicate with their fan bases. Enhanced messaging could make it possible for music acts, who were what made MySpace popular in the first place and are undoubtedly a big part of its new entertainment-centric strategy, to use MySpace to communicate with fans who might not be using MySpace.

For ordinary users, meanwhile, e-mail addresses could help pull the MySpace brand off its domain and give it more reach--much like the MySpace ID universal log-in product, which hasn't really rolled out yet (and which may have had large-scale success quashed by the ubiquity of Facebook Connect). And while revamping its messaging system might not bring in many new users for MySpace, it could help stall potential attrition.

MySpace has allowed its users to reserve "vanity URLs" for their profiles for years now--something that Facebook only started doing this summer.

The new Facebook inbox.

(Credit: Facebook)

Well, according to a post on the official Facebook blog, the social network's messaging feature is getting a much-needed revamp from its cruddy, bare-bones state. Select users have the new in-box now; it'll be rolling out to everyone else over the next few weeks.

The catch is that there aren't actually very many new features, just a better presentation of existing ones for the most part. You'll now be able to accomplish such technological marvels as filter your in-box for unread messages (wow!) and flag unwanted messages as spam.

There's also a more clearly delineated division between messages from friends on your friends list and updates from brands' "fan pages" that previously all went into the same in-box.

Some more updates are on the way. "Over time, we plan to migrate messages from Groups and Events to Updates as well, so you have more control over the communication you receive," the post by Facebook's Scott Marlette read. That means the message from the guy who just reconnected with you on Facebook after not speaking to you since the fourth-grade spider-in-the-lunchbox incident will have a different destination than the message to all guests of next week's Bocce ball tournament.

So, no, Facebook probably won't be replacing your e-mail client yet. But more importantly--it's prettier. Oh, and you can flag spam now--that's important.

Twitter search results for 'Gmail.' Looks like we have an outage.

(Credit: Twitter)

Well, this was something nice to wake up to on a Friday morning: No access to my Gmail account. I was greeted with a "Temporary Error (500)" and the message, "We're sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes." Ugh. Thanks, Google.

I went over to Twitter Search to see what other people were saying, and sure enough, a search for "gmail" produced plenty of complaints about outages, with hundreds more rolling in by the minute. Many of them, given the timing (it was about 6 a.m. Eastern time) appeared to be in Europe or Asia.

Some complained that other Google apps were down, too, but I could access the three that I use most often (Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Reader) just fine.

Gmail suffered an outage in February that was big enough for the company to apologize for it; that one, as well as a smaller one in March, took place when it was the middle of the night in the company's Bay Area headquarters. Perhaps this is Google's way of telling people on the East Coast to stop waking up so early.

I'm a free Gmail user, and I'm guessing that so are most of the twitterers airing their grievances. But for paying Gmail customers, Google promises 99.9 percent uptime, or it'll reimburse them to some degree.

Update (3:23 a.m. PT): About a half hour after I originally noticed that my account was down, it's back up (at least for now), but loading very slowly.

Update (4:48 a.m. PT): Google has issued a statement: "A number of our users had difficulty accessing Gmail this morning. The problem was immediately investigated, and service was restored within 20 minutes. We know how important Gmail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We encourage anyone having technical difficulty to visit the Gmail Discussion Group or the Apps Status Dashboard."

Social-network aggregator FriendFeed announced Tuesday that it's built in a Twitter friend importer, and my e-mail in-box was sort of thrown into shock.

See, here's the thing: I have a FriendFeed account, but I don't really use it; not enough of my friends do, and I've never found aggregators to really fit my social-networking habits in general. I'm a big Twitter user, however. So when FriendFeed instituted its Twitter contact import feature, I was flooded with dozens of subscription requests from people I'd never heard of. Before I was clued into the new tool, I wondered if there was a spammer problem or something; I can only imagine what it must have been like for really popular Twitter users with tens of thousands of followers.

The thing about having a Twitter friend importer is that following people on Twitter doesn't have the same kind of tie that comes from being Facebook friends (in which both members have to reciprocate) or being listed in someone's e-mail address book (which implies active communication). On the other hand, if you're both a Twitter user and a FriendFeed user, you probably will want to know what the people you follow on Twitter are up to on FriendFeed, so a contact importer makes sense in some cases.

Wednesday I went into my FriendFeed account settings and turned off e-mail notifications. Sorry, guys, but I needed some quiet. And if I want to find my friends on FriendFeed, I'm willing to dig in and look around for them.

Glam Media has always insisted that it's not just an ad network, and an announcement the women's-focused media firm made Monday underscored that.

Glam has launched "Glam Today," a daily newsletter featuring a selection of content from the more than 500 sites in its network of independently run blogs that serve the company's ads.

"Glam Today surfaces and highlights some of the best content created daily by the professional publishers across the Glam network," Ryan Roslansky, Glam Media's vice president of products, said in a release Monday. "Glam Media's focus on packaging display advertising with relevant content extends is core to everything we do and extends to our premium e-mail products like Glam Today designed for publishers."

It's a five-day-a-week affair: Monday's newsletter will focus on fashion and shopping, Tuesday's on beauty, Wednesday's on "living," Thursday's on entertainment, and Friday's on health.

It's a bit surprising that Glam hasn't launched something like this before: for the parent company, it's another outlet for ads, and for sites in the Glam network, it's more exposure, as well as, perhaps, the cozy feeling that they're part of something more than a plain old ad network.

There are plenty of e-mail newsletters focusing on the women's market, though. DailyCandy has been around for years and is extremely popular, though it should be said that its newsletters focus primarily on women in select U.S. cities, and Sugar has a newsletter called (wait for it...) DailySugar.

Other popular online newsletters have primarily female readerships, like Vital Juice Daily and Ideal Bite (just acquired by Disney).

A look at new Gmail security features that let you know where else you're logged in.

(Credit: Google)

Gmail users now have some extra ways to make sure no one can snoop around in their e-mail accounts, a post Monday afternoon on the Official Gmail Blog explained. The Google e-mail service provider is introducing a feature so that members can see where they're logged in and then opt to log out if they want.

The feature is currently rolling out to Gmail members using the Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers.

At the bottom of your Gmail window, you will now see if you're logged on in any other locations, the post by engineer Erwin D'Souza explained. You can then click through to find out the other IP addresses where you're logged in, and whether those locations are Web-based, on mobile devices, or elsewhere.

Finally, in the event that you see your ex's iPhone listed as one of the IP addresses, you can click a button to sign out all locations other than the one where you're currently clicking around on Gmail. Then it's time to think about whether it's creepy that you know the IP address of your ex's iPhone.

"If you are anything like me, you probably sign in to Gmail from multiple computers," D'Souza wrote. "I, for example, occasionally sign into my Gmail account from a friend's house when I need to check an important email. Usually I remember to sign out, but every once in a while I wonder if I really did. Now I no longer have to wonder."

MIAMI--The way people have been talking about e-mail at the Future of Web Apps conference, you'd think it were a cell phone carrier or a domestic airline. It's antiquated, it's backward, and everybody hates it.

Kevin Marks, a Google engineer and Technorati veteran, said in a talk about the company's OpenSocial project and Social Graph APIs that e-mail is a "strange legacy idea."

"E-mail has died away for a group of users. For the younger generation, they don't use e-mail," he said, talking about the young Web users who have started to abandon e-mail for Facebook messaging and mobile texting. "They see it as this noisy spam-filled thing that annoys them every day...they see it as how you talk to the university, how you talk to the bank." Marks pointed to technologies like OpenID that promote the notion that online identities these days are defined by so much more than e-mail addresses--URLs and social-networking profiles, to name a few.

Marks wasn't the only one expounding upon e-mail's suckiness. Earlier in the day, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg inferred that overwhelming volumes of spam were making Web users explore options other than e-mail.

And when a lively group of Web 2.0 elite (including Mullenweg, Digg's Kevin Rose, Pownce's Leah Culver, and Flickr's Cal Henderson) tackled a panel led by TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld that involved creating the concept for a new Web app in 45 minutes, their end result was a product that would make e-mail less of a headache by making sure that users reply to everything. (It was done in 45 minutes, so the specifics weren't totally ironed out.)

To top it all off, when I had a meeting with Marks on Friday morning, we used Twitter direct messaging rather than e-mail to confirm the time and location.

That was before Twitter suffered a downage when the start-up's architect, Blaine Cook, was giving a talk later in the day at FOWA and his phone kept ringing with calls from the site's server administrators. Twitter's unreliability is well-known, and certainly calls into question the fact that all these messaging start-ups and social-networking features that are supposedly killing e-mail still might not be stable enough to overhaul the way we communicate.

The recent high-profile e-mail provider crashes, however, provide a counterpoint.

If there were snakes on this plane, you could IM your friends and tell them.

Low-cost airline JetBlue has equipped one of its Airbus A320 planes with an onboard wireless network and has forged partnerships with Yahoo and BlackBerry manufacturer Research In Motion to give passengers access to the companies' e-mail and instant messaging functions while in the air. The airline considers the plane, nicknamed "BetaBlue," to be an early-stage test as the company explores expanding in-flight communication options.

(Credit: JetBlue)

Passengers won't be able to surf the full Web. But if they bring Wi-Fi-equipped laptops along, they can access lightweight versions of Yahoo e-mail and instant messaging services; BlackBerry owners who have Wi-Fi-enabled handsets (the BlackBerry 8820 and BlackBerry Curve 8320) will be able to access their personal and corporate e-mail. BlackBerry models that have only cellular connections rather than Wi-Fi won't be compatible--the Federal Communications Commission still has a ban on cellular service in-flight.

The plane will take its inaugural flight on Tuesday morning, making the cross-country trip from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport to San Francisco International Airport. After that, "BetaBlue" will be added to JetBlue's regular flight lineup; a company representative told CNET News.com that there will be no way to specifically request the messaging-equipped plane, nor will any additional fee be charged for the service.

It's been known for well over a year that JetBlue had been planning some sort of in-flight wireless initiative. LiveTV, a division of the airline, was awarded a 1MHz air-to-ground wireless license from the FCC in June 2006, following an intense bidding war. After 120 bids, LiveTV paid $7 million for the license, which offers full coverage of the continental U.S. above 10,000 feet. Another company, AirCell, obtained a 3MHz license for $31.3 million in the same FCC auction.

Earlier this year, JetBlue representatives hinted that they were interested in exploring options for in-flight text messaging--but that would require a relaxation of the FCC's stringent regulations.

As the major players in the airline industry compete with one another in an increasingly tech-savvy world, carriers have touted in-flight tech innovations like satellite TV service and electrical power connections. JetBlue already offers DirecTV service, as well as XM satellite radio on some of its newer planes. When Virgin America first took off in August, geeks drooled over the USB and power connections, MP3 library, and a messaging service that lets lonely passengers strike up conversations with fellow travelers on the same plane.

But when it comes to communication services (Virgin America's intra-plane messaging aside), there have been some major momentum issues. Cell phone use on planes is still a contentious topic, but it's nevertheless likely imminent on some foreign carriers and some wireless companies see it as a potential source of profit.

Broadband Internet is a different story. Connexion, a paid in-flight broadband service from Boeing, was used by a number of foreign airlines, like Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines, before it was officially shut down at the end of 2006. There's been no word from Panasonic recently on a rumored plan to succeed where Connexion had failed.

And when BetaBlue takes off on Tuesday, it will make the Forest Hills, N.Y.-based JetBlue the first domestic airline carrier to offer any kind of wireless service in the air. Virgin America's planes have Ethernet ports at each seat, but they remain inactive.

JetBlue representatives said that if BetaBlue proves successful, expansions to the program will become evident over the next year. This would possibly include either installing the Yahoo and RIM services on other planes, or expanding the wireless offerings.