Webware

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.

Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. subsidiary that owns social sites MySpace and Photobucket, has signed on as the latest member of the Family Online Safety Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to "identifying and promoting best practice, tools and methods in the field of online safety, that also respect free expression."

As the first social network to become a nationwide teen craze, MySpace became a frequent target for safety advocates--including state lawmakers, who ended up working with the social network to create a safety plan for kids and teens online.

Other prominent members of FOSI include AOL, AT&T, Cisco, Comcast, Google, Loopt, Microsoft, Ning, Verizon, and a number of international telecommunications carriers.

"FOSI has been a dedicated leader in promoting online safety and we look forward to contributing to the work they do," Fox Interactive Media Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam said in a statement Friday. "Internet safety is a key priority for us as we strive to keep all teens safer online. This new membership will further strengthen our efforts and will also allow us to share our expertise with other members."

FOSI holds an annual conference about online safety: this year's will be on December 11 in Washington, D.C.

MySpace, the social network owned by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media, announced Wednesday that it has hired five new members for its executive team--three senior vice presidents and two vice president--in fields ranging from engineering to customer service. They're coming from a mixed background of media and tech.

Manu Thapar, former vice president of engineering at Yahoo, has been hired as MySpace's senior vice president of engineering, a role that involves architecture and security management as well as the creation of an offshore development team. Another Yahoo veteran, Tish Whitcraft, has joined MySpace as senior vice president of customer care and will oversee the construction of a "self-help" tool for MySpace users.

On the media side, Angela Courtin has been hired as MySpace's senior vice president of marketing, entertainment, and content. She comes from MTV Networks, where she was vice president of integrated marketing. Jason Oberfest, a former biz-dev guru at Los Angeles Times Interactive, has been hired as vice president of business development to work in both deal making and developer relations. And Abe Thomas, a former employee of eBay and its PayPal subsidiary, has been hired as vice president of online marketing.

But the revolving doors at MySpace are moving fast. TechCrunch reported Tuesday that the company was looking to lay off as much as 5 percent of its workforce, which chief operating officer Amit Kapur confirmed to the blog later in the day. But the exec classified the move as "performance driven," meaning that fired employees would be replaced and that MySpace was actually looking to hire as many as 300 new employees.

The hiring announcement comes so close on the heels of the layoff reports that conspiracy theorists might speculate MySpace put out a release about fairly recent executive picks to temper any bad press. But when asked, a MySpace representative classified the hires as "very recent...or are locked and loaded to start soon," so it's more likely that personnel changes just happened to fall into the rumor mill at an opportune time.

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.

Photobucket, the photo-sharing site that was acquired by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media last year, is expected to launch a "group albums" feature on Wednesday.

"Group Albums are designed to offer a simple way for colleagues, friends, and families to collaborate on creating photos and video collections where the entire group can contribute, access, and enjoy them," Photobucket President Alex Welch explained in a statement Tuesday. Photobucket released its first developer application program interface (API) last month.

Basically, these are collaborative media-sharing albums much like the "groups" feature in Yahoo's Flickr. Photobucket's release suggests that they could be used to pool photos and videos of weddings, graduations, concerts, and the like. You could also create groups for pictures of dogs on skateboards, superhero-inspired Halloween costumes, or whatever else you might want, but keep in mind that Photobucket likes to keep things squeaky-clean.

Additional features of Photobucket's group albums, which have a 1GB storage limit, include the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed of updates, create a slideshow, and if you're the group owner, get e-mail notifications when new photos or video are added.

Group administrators also can create their own easy-to-remember URLs, for example, photobucket.com/cuteboyswithnoshirts.

Reuters reported on Monday afternoon that social-networking site MySpace.com plans to launch a "news feed" feature in the near future.

The statement was made by Peter Levinsohn, president of MySpace parent company (and News Corp. division) Fox Interactive Media, at the Reuters Media Summit on Monday. "The concept of a news feed is something we are very focused on, and we'll be well down the path in the next 30 to 45 days," Levinsohn said at the summit.

The news feed, which provides a user with updates from the people on his or her friends list, was pioneered by MySpace rival Facebook. Originally seen as invasive and "stalker-ish," the news feed is now considered by many to be one of Facebook's chief innovations.

Additionally, Reuters reported, Levinsohn said that MySpace will start allowing its members to operate different versions of a profile for groups like family, friends, and co-workers. This is something that Facebook does not offer--though the company has hinted that it may be on the way--but more recent entrants like Plaxo Pulse do.

MySpace, to put it bluntly, is playing catch-up. It still leads the U.S. social-networking market in overall membership and traffic, but has come under fire for everything from design to usability to underlying architecture. In recent weeks, the company has opted to join Google's OpenSocial platform, potentially boosting its tech cred--and announced a targeted advertising program days before Facebook launched its "Social Ads."

Earlier today it was made official, after much speculation, that Photobucket had been acquired by Fox Interactive Media, a division of News Corp. CNET News.com spoke with Photobucket CEO and co-founder Alex Welch on Wednesday morning to hash out some of the rumors and talk about what's in store for the popular image-sharing site.

According to Welch, the company put itself up for sale in order to accelerate growth beyond its current membership base of approximately 42 million. "When we look at Fox, it was really a natural choice for Photobucket because we really want to grow out our brand globally," he said. "It was really about taking that next step much sooner and much faster."

Rumors had suggested that the acquisition would be on the part of the Fox Interactive-owned MySpace, but as it turns out, Photobucket will be an individual Fox Interactive property--not a division of MySpace. "All of our discussions have been directly with Fox Interactive Media," Welch explained. "Photobucket is going to be acquired by Fox Interactive, and Photobucket is going to remain a standalone company within Fox Interactive."

Photobucket will indeed remain intact, but Welch said that the company has "a very detailed product roadmap over the next couple years" concerning its new involvement with Fox Interactive. He hinted that some of the company's other brands, like gaming site IGN.com, may come into play.

Tech news junkies have probably been wondering exactly how the deal came to fruition, considering the much-publicized spat between Photobucket and MySpace when the social networking site decided to block all videos and slideshows from Photobucket last month. The conflict, which stemmed from Photobucket's advertising tie-ins with Spider-Man 3, was eventually resolved. But then acquisition rumors started to swirl, and it all seemed a little bit disjointed.

Obviously, a lot of the details can't be publicly disclosed. But Welch was able to say that that was because Photobucket had been in discussion with Fox Interactive, not its MySpace division. There hadn't initially been much communication between the acquisition talks with Fox Interactive and the terms-of-service debate with MySpace. "We'd been in discussion with a number of parties, including Fox. The incident that happened was between Photobucket and MySpace, not Photobucket and Fox. It was an isolated incident," Welch said. "We resolved the issues by opening up discussions between the companies," and then the acquisition talks with Fox Interactive were able to continue while Photobucket's widgets returned to MySpace.

From what it sounds like, things appear to be running smoothly now.

The announcement from Fox Interactive on Wednesday also revealed that, as rumored, the company had acquired media mashup tool Flektor. But Welch said that there isn't any immediate collaboration between Photobucket and Flektor--yet. Instead, Photobucket is going to focus on its own growth. "As of right now, we're going to continue to build our our toolset to really satisfy our users, to give them really interesting things to do with media."

It's official: MySpace.com parent company Fox Interactive Media has formally announced its agreements to acquire image-sharing site Photobucket and slide show mashup creator Flektor. Financial terms of the purchases were not disclosed by Fox Interactive Media, which is a division of media giant News Corp.

Both acquisitions had been rumored for some time. The Photobucket deal, originally reported earlier this month, is inarguably the more significant of the two: Photobucket, after all, is the 34th most visited site on the Web, with over 42 million users and 17 million monthly visitors. Its history with Fox Interactive Media hasn't been smooth: There was well-publicized friction between the two companies when MySpace blocked Photobucket's embeddable video and slide show widgets in April, citing a terms-of-service violation related to a Spider-Man 3 advertising campaign. Later in April, Photobucket announced that an accord had been reached with MySpace, and within weeks, the acquisition rumors began to fly. The rumored price has been about $250 million.

In a post on Photobucket's official blog, co-founder Alex Welch wrote that "we expect nothing to change in our day-to-day operations," and that "the plan is to operate Photobucket as an independent, standalone company within FIM."

As for Flektor, reputedly a $10 million to $20 million purchase for Fox Interactive Media, initial reports circulated on TechCrunch several weeks ago. Flektor, which lets people edit audio, video and photos to create their own embeddable slide shows, was founded just last year.

Photobucket and Flektor, however, will not become MySpace properties as many of the early reports had hinted; they'll instead be Fox Interactive Media brands, alongside MySpace as well as IGN.com and Rotten Tomatoes.