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.
Microsoft executive Qi Lu will reportedly make a big announcement onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco later on Wednesday morning: that its search engine, Bing, has inked deals with both Twitter and Facebook to bring real-time status updates and tweets into search results. That's something you can't find on Google.
According to AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, neither partnership will actually turn into a product for "weeks, if not months," and that both Twitter and Facebook have also been talking to Google about similar deals.
When asked about the deal announcement earlier on Wednesday at Web 2.0 Summit, Microsoft director of search Stefan Weitz declined to comment, saying, "I have no idea."
Facebook's mum, too. "We don't comment on speculation," a statement e-mailed on Wednesday morning by Facebook spokeswoman Kathleen Loughlin read. "Later today, COO Sheryl Sandberg and VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer will be speaking at Web 2.0 at which time they will be available to answer questions regarding Facebook."
Rumors started swirling earlier this month that Twitter was looking to make big search-results partnerships with Google and Microsoft.
Microsoft already has a stake in Facebook, which it obtained when it invested $240 million in the social network--allegedly beating Google to the punch then, too--two years ago.
While Twitter is far smaller than Facebook, it's already a step ahead in searchability: it acquired third-party Twitter search app Summize last year and built it into the powerful, real-time Twitter Search. Facebook used to keep all of its data behind a log-in wall, but two years ago started to make the first steps toward becoming more accessible to search engines when it gave members the option to let their profiles show up in "people search" queries on the likes of Google.
More recently, it's been making additional small moves toward opening profile content to the Web, like redefining its privacy controls so that members can specify which of their information and updates can be made public.
This post was updated at 9:53 a.m. PT.
Facebook has partnered with liberal news outlet The Huffington Post in an officially sanctioned implementation of its Facebook Connect product.
Called HuffPost Social News, the new site aggregates Huffington Post stories that a given user's Facebook friends have recommended or commented on, and shares the user's Huffington Post activity on their Facebook profiles in turn.
It's a concept fairly similar to TimesPeople, the sharing service that The New York Times launched last year.
"Our goal is to make HuffPost Social News the go-to place for Facebook users to share news--both the stories they love and the stories they hate--with friends," Eric Hippeau, Huffington Post's still-new CEO, said in a release. "It should also appeal to marketers interested in reaching passionate, savvy readers who care about the news and who want to share their interests with friends."
This use of Facebook Connect is unusual because Facebook typically does not undertake many official partnerships with third-party sites when it comes to its developer APIs. And this particular partnership may come under some scrutiny: The Huffington Post, which began as a political news site and has since expanded into many other areas of coverage, is controversial--not only in terms of its partisan leanings (it was co-founded by left-of-center pundit Arianna Huffington) but because the majority of its bloggers are unpaid and because some critics have argued it relies too heavily on third-party content that it doesn't always pay for.
But the social network's executives appear to have given The Huffington Post their stamp of approval, at least when it comes to the site's model for news consumption.
"The Huffington Post has led a revolution in how people discover and consume news," Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, herself a veteran of the political world, said in a release. "With the integration of Facebook Connect, HuffPost Social News is now leading the way to make news even more of a social experience, giving people new ways to share and filter news and current events through their networks of friends on Facebook."
Facebook likely hopes that this partnership will be a sort of example to the news industry--which is obviously looking for some new ideas right now--and that other media outlets will, in turn, build similar products.
When MySpace launched its MySpace Music service, a joint venture with all the major record labels, in September, it was subject to a persistent criticism: that independent music, the original backbone of the social network's success, had been put on the back burner in favor of the hits.
But now, the News Corp.-owned MySpace has added a handful of independent music partners, both labels and distribution companies, to bring more of the indies to its catalog. As of Thursday, Nettwerk, INgrooves, Iris Distribution, RoyaltyShare, and Wind-up Entertainment have joined MySpace Music, adding "several hundred thousand" songs.
To be fair, MySpace Music has had a partnership from the start with Sony ATV, which gave it access to other indie distributors like The Orchard and Fontana.
"These important new partnerships will allow the MySpace Music community to access even more of their favorite independent music while enabling monetization opportunities for the newly licensed artists," said MySpace Music President Courtney Holt, who was hired from MTV Networks to head the streaming music service. "We are thrilled to have our new partners on board and will continue our aggressive content acquisition efforts."
Social news site Reddit, which was acquired by Conde Nast's Wired Digital division two years ago, has announced the start of a new strategy to distribute its technology around the Web. It's partnered with the U.K.'s Independent newspaper to install Reddit technology on its Web site and encourage readers to vote up and down on the news.
While a prominent button for the Independent's internal voting system will appear on each of the publication's online news stories (these will show up in a few weeks), it will also accept links submitted from around the Web.
"It's this kind of open mentality that really excited us about working with them," co-founder Alexis Ohanian said in an e-mail.
Reddit opted to make its code open-source in June, an announcement that would presumably lead to the kinds of deals that the company announced on Thursday. It's far smaller than rival Digg, but seems to have a clear message in place: that Reddit is about distribution, not a standalone site.
Here's a deal that never could've happened in the absence of the developer platform craze: SocialMedia, a media network that focuses on the fledgling niche of "engagement ads," is set to announce a partnership with BuddyMedia, which creates branded applications for clients.
More specifically, SocialMedia clients will have access to BuddyMedia's new analytics and research product, which it calls "BuddyBrain" and formally launched last week. BuddyMedia licenses BuddyBrain as part of a program that it calls "App-vertising Resellers," and the two companies have already teamed up on ad campaigns for clients like FedEx, Anheuser-Busch, and sneaker company New Balance. Terms of this deal were not disclosed.
BuddyMedia launched its own ad network for social-network applications in April.
Right now, social advertising is the talk of the town in New York because of the Web 2.0 Expo this week and the Interactive Advertising Bureau-sponsored Advertising Week next week. There's still plenty of unproven idealism surrounding the niche, and deal-making like this doesn't assuage occasional industry concerns about social advertising's effectiveness. But analytics will likely be a boost for SocialMedia's clients--if they get statistical hints that their Facebook applications are having a legitimate impact, their confidence in the new medium could get a little less shaky.
Photobucket, the massive photo-sharing site that was acquired by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media last year, has partnered with Scrapblog, a start-up that lets members create online scrapbooks.
Through the partnership, whose financial terms were not disclosed, Scrapblog's drag-and-drop application will be available within Photobucket so that users can work their Photobucket albums into scrapbooks and then share or embed them on the Web. Starting in September, printed versions of Scrapblog scrapbooks will be available for purchase.
"Scrapbooks have traditionally been an important part of how people have kept and shared memories offline for many years, and bringing that capability online to Photobucket gives users even more options for enhancing their lives and expressing themselves digitally," Photobucket president Alex Welch said in a release. "We are excited to partner with Scrapblog, and be the first photo and video Web site to integrate a digital-scrapbooking feature directly into the site, making it easy, convenient, and accessible to everyone."
Coral Gables, Fla.-based Scrapblog, founded in 2006, has created scrapbook-related marketing campaigns for brands ranging from Carnival Cruise Lines to the ABC television series Ugly Betty (parent company Disney is an investor). Longworth Venture Partners led Scrapblog's Series A venture round in March 2007.
Looks like some big-media deal-making went into this one.
Photobucket, the photo-sharing site that was acquired by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media last year, has announced the launch of an iPhone application (download), just like everybody else.
Users can browse their Photobucket albums, as well as upload images from the iPhone to the service with a single click. The application costs $4.99.
But Photobucket had a more interesting announcement on Thursday, namely a multiyear partnership with Ask.com, the search engine owned by new-media conglomerate InterActiveCorp.
Through the deal, Photobucket will use exclusively Ask.com search for its photo, video, and Web searches, and some of Ask.com's text and display ads will be shown on Photobucket. No financial specifics were mentioned.
"Photobucket has one of the largest online audiences, and now Ask.com provides these consumers with the answers to the questions they ask every day," said Andrew Moers, general manager of partnerships for Ask, the No. 4 player in search. "This alliance furthers our strategy to bring Ask.com to consumers worldwide through a broad range of Internet access points."
Photobucket sister company MySpace, meanwhile, has its search (and many of its ads) handled by Google. But on that note, Google has provided ad technology to Ask.com since the dinosaur days of 2004.
At the many advertising conferences dotting Internet Week New York this week, speakers and panelists have been exhorting the ad industry to start thinking more creatively when it comes to tackling digital media--even creating elaborate branded series in lieu of traditional commercials.
They weren't the only ones who got that memo. Record label Universal Music Group's Universal Music U.K. announced Monday that it's partnered with social network Bebo to broadcast a series called The Secret World of Sam King: one part video blog, one part Choose Your Own Adventure, and one part Universal advertorial. It's being produced by Globe Productions, a division of Universal.
The premise of the new series is that Sam King, an extremely low-level fictional employee of Universal Music, decides to found his own record label in the company mail room. Along the way, he encounters real-life Universal artists, and viewers will be able to submit opinions, send in material, and suggest which bands Sam should scout.
The show will also be fueled by product placement, with handset manufacturer Sony Ericsson signing on as the inaugural brand sponsor. Apparently this will lead to the protagonist "winding his boss up with mobile phone-related pranks."
Bebo and Universal have not provided a concrete debut date.
Universal's concept of a "brand show" is a bit similar to Back On Topps, a series created by former Disney exec Michael Eisner's video start-up Vuguru, as a promotion for the trading card company (which Eisner himself owns). That series, premiering this week, also pits fictional company employees against the celebrities affiliated with it--in Topps' case, famous athletes.
For Bebo, which has its biggest audience in the U.K., and parent company AOL, its 42 million members get video content that will (ideally) be enjoyable and will keep them around. It'll also be cross-promoted across other AOL video brands. For Universal, creating an (ideally) hip show geared toward Bebo's young users could help recapture the attention of a generation that's turned away from the major labels and in the direction of BitTorrent.
Yahoo announced Friday that it has formed a partnership with three subsidiaries of advertising giant WPP: GroupM, 24/7 Real Media and WPP Digital. Through the deal, WPP agencies will have access to Yahoo-served ad space and work closely with the Right Media ad exchange, in which Yahoo was a major investor before it outright acquired the digital-ad platform in 2007.
No financial terms were disclosed.
"More and more, we see the need for agencies and media and technology companies to work together to create a new level of value," WPP Digital CEO Mark Read said in a statement Friday. "We are very pleased to have established this partnership with Yahoo which, enabled by our earlier acquisition of 24/7 Real Media, will turn this vision into a reality."
WPP acquired 24/7 Real Media a year ago for $649 million in cash. As part of the deal with Yahoo, WPP will use 24/7 to develop an ad platform that connects to Right Media so that WPP agencies can "seamlessly" connect to Yahoo's digital inventory.
