Webware

MySpace started off as a hub for indie bands to connect with their fans. Now, with a new partnership with the IAC/InterActiveCorp-owned Citysearch, it's hoping to do the same for the likes of bars, clubs, and restaurants.

Called "MySpace Local," the new section on the News Corp.-owned MySpace will be rooted in existing listings from Citysearch (restricted to major U.S. cities) that are souped up with social features like the ones that you might see on a band or celebrity's MySpace page (photos, videos, comments, and the like). It's launching with just "restaurants," "bars," and "nightlife" categories, but will eventually expand--and it'll only be available to a select number of users this week before rolling out to the rest of MySpace's U.S. users.

"We're using the tools of new media to make the discovery as social and therefore as relevant as possible," said Jeff Berman, president of sales and marketing at MySpace, in a conference call on Tuesday. "The first thing you will see are ratings and reviews from your actual friends. When a reviewer is anonymous or unknown, it's hard to say whether you should care what they think."

Eventually, MySpace Local will highlight reviews from celebrities, "influencers," and power users with "street cred." There will also be new features like menus and possibly an online reservation tool.

This move will put MySpace in competition with fast-growing reviews site Yelp, which has been dealing with image and credibility issues recently but which has nevertheless been catching up to Citysearch in reach.

It'll also present more opportunities for local advertising. The social network has been courting small advertisers with a program called MyAds. But there will be big brand advertisers on MySpace Local, too, with Outback Steakhouse and Coors signing on for the launch.

Citysearch, which recently overhauled its site, also syndicates some of its content to AOL.

Berman said that research showed about 50 percent of active Citysearch users have MySpace profiles that they check at least once a month. "There is healthy overlap, but there is also a healthy new audience to be reached," he said.

This post was expanded at 10:54 a.m. PDT.

236.com, a comedy site developed as a joint venture between liberal news site The Huffington Post and Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp, will be a joint venture no more. The site will become a Huffington Post subsidiary and is slated to be re-branded as "Huffington Post Comedy." Financial terms were not disclosed.

"After a successful first year as a standalone comedy site we are excited to bring 236 into The Huffington Post as we launch our comedy vertical," Huffington Post co-founder and namesake Arianna Huffington said in a release Tuesday. "We look forward to creating a section that serves not only as a one-stop-shop for humor with a satirical take on the news but a spirited community for all comedy lovers."

Reports surfaced in December that IAC was looking to spin off some of its smaller properties, 236.com possibly among them.

Though it began as a political news site, the Huffington Post has gradually expanded into other news and lifestyle areas to broaden its coverage. The "Comedy" section created from 236.com will join sections like entertainment, media, and "green" news.

The Huffington Post closed a $25 million funding round in December.

A report on PaidContent suggests that InterActiveCorp, the media conglomerate owned by Barry Diller, may be looking to sell off some of its smaller ad-supported content properties--effectively, tossing assets overboard to lighten the load during rough financial seas.

According to PaidContent, IAC may be "dissolving" its "programming" group, a set of ad-supported content businesses that includes CollegeHumor, 236.com (a joint venture with The Huffington Post), Very Short List, and the brand-new The Daily Beast. The restructuring reportedly involves the departure of Nick Lehman, chief operating officer of the programming group.

A CollegeHumor executive told CNET News in an e-mail that the comedy site would not be sold. IAC took a majority stake in its parent company, Connected Ventures, which also owns BustedTees and Vimeo, two years ago.

More likely? News comedy site 236 may become wholly owned by The Huffington Post, which just raised $25 million in funding. Very Short List, an e-mail newsletter, may also be up for sale.

IAC underwent a five-way split earlier this year as Diller, convinced that the unfocused nature of the conglomerate was keeping share prices down, spun off properties such as Ticketmaster and LendingTree in order to focus on online media businesses.

Citysearch is still ahead, butupstart rival Yelp is catching up. Good thing Citysearch has brought in some much-needed new social features.

(Credit: Compete.com)

Citysearch, the online business directory owned by Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp, has gotten a full makeover. It's available now at beta.citysearch.com--there's a more streamlined and Ajax-y interface, but a few important features have been tweaked as well. According to company representatives, this is about a year and a half in the making.

First of all, instead of focusing on a select number of metro areas, Citysearch has expanded to a whopping 75,000 towns and neighborhoods, meaning that you can narrow down your focus to New York's East Village or Los Angeles' Culver City. Additionally, there's Facebook Connect integration, meaning that you can see what your Facebook friends have recommended or reviewed on Citysearch. Also on the social side of things, reviewing businesses on Citysearch is easier and more up-front. Previously, there had been more attention on editorial reviews as opposed to user reviews.

And Facebook approves, apparently. "At Facebook, we've found that remarkable things happen when you get trust, user control and identity right--people share more information, and become more open and connected," Facebook communications czar Elliot Schrage said in a joint release. "Citysearch's innovative new site shows how Facebook Connect can help information flow faster through a site while creating a filter for users to engage with localized content through the lens of their friends, family and colleagues."

That's a big deal for Citysearch: fast-growing start-up Yelp has started to gain some market share in the "user-generated reviews" department. According to traffic firm Compete.com, Yelp is still smaller but catching up. (Citysearch, for that matter, syndicates some of its content to big portals like AOL.)

Finally, Citysearch has launched a mobile site compatible with a number of different browsers and handsets--yes, including Apple's iPhone.

A class action lawsuit filed earlier this week targets Facebook and eight of the participants in Beacon, its ill-fated advertising product that shared information about third-party site activity with the social network. The set of 20 plaintiffs, mostly residents of Texas, filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday. Named as defendants are Facebook, as well as current or former Beacon participants Blockbuster, Fandango (owned by Comcast), Overstock.com, STA Travel, Zappos, Hotwire (owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp), and GameFly.

A Facebook representative told CNET News on Thursday that the company had not yet actually been served with the lawsuit, and that its legal team consequently did not have a formal statement at the time. STA Travel, Gamefly, and Overstock all declined to comment; none of the other defendants could be immediately reached.

"Until we're served, we're not being sued, so we don't have any comment," Overstock general counsel Mark Griffin told CNET News.

Beacon gained almost immediate notoriety when Facebook unveiled it as part of its Facebook Ads announcement last fall. Privacy advocates, most notably liberal activist group MoveOn.org, lambasted the program for not allowing users to disable it easily. Facebook has since modified the program and the controversy has wound down. But in the lawsuit, the plaintiffs point to the window of time before Facebook instituted the new controls--between November 7 and December 5 of last year--and claims that the social network still has access to a large amount of user data that was gathered in that period.

"If the user was not a member (of Facebook), Facebook still obtained the notification from the Facebook Beacon Activated Affiliate," the filing for Lane et al v. Facebook, Inc. read. "Information regarding user activities was sent in real time to a third party Web site--one which was not open or active in the user's browser, and one which, in many cases, the user may never even have visited or heard of."

There's one odd law that may make the plaintiffs' case stronger: the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988. The law was passed amid the fracas surrounding Robert Bork's controversial nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, when a journalist obtained Bork's movie rental record from a local video store and published it.

That's why there's already been a suit involving Beacon that specifically targeted Blockbuster for participating in such a program: a Texas woman filed suit against Blockbuster in April, claiming that the VPPA bars it from Beacon. Facebook was not named as a defendant in that suit, and though the plaintiff sought class action status for her case, she does not appear to have any involvement in this week's suit.

The defendants named in the suit don't encompass all of Facebook's original Beacon partners, but several of them could tie into VPPA protections: GameFly rents video games, Fandango sells movie tickets, Hotwire and STA deal with travel bookings, and Zappos and Overstock are both online retailers with a large scope (Overstock sells DVDs, for example). The suit also names the California Computer Crime Law and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act as grounds for the suit.

One of the plaintiffs, Sean Lane of Waltham, Mass., was immortalized in a Washington Post story about Beacon: He's the guy who bought his wife a diamond ring on Overstock.com, only to have her spot the purchase in a Facebook news feed, spoiling the surprise.

Guess he's still irritated.

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.

A Los Angeles-based law firm with a history of targeting online media companies for click fraud filed suit Tuesday against Citysearch, the directory site owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, as well as Ticketmaster, the ticketing site that IAC is attempting to spin out into a separate publicly traded company.

"Citysearch.com is defrauding its advertising customers of millions of dollars by not only turning a blind eye to click fraud, but in fact encouraging it as well," a statement from the firm Kabateck Brown Kellner read. The class action suit encompasses anyone in the U.S. who paid for pay-per-click advertising space on Citysearch, but the named plaintiff is Tom Lambotte, who purchased ad space on Citysearch and then claimed that the number of clicks on his ads rose suspiciously.

Representatives from IAC and Citysearch were not immediately available for comment.

According to the complaint, filed in a California court, Lambotte first purchased Citysearch ads in late 2007, didn't see a gain in traffic to his site, and attempted to cancel his ad account. The cancellation process dragged out, he said, and in the meantime his ad clicks started to escalate suspiciously. He speculated that click fraud--in which clicks to ads are meant only to drive up the rate the advertiser pays and not to purchase the product--was at play.

Claims in click fraud lawsuits are sometimes questionable, and Kabateck Brown Kellner has extensive experience in the field that could raise a red flag: the plaintiff-only firm has won against both Yahoo and Google, and attorney Brian Kabateck recently went after Google's AdWords advertising program, claiming that it deceived customers.

Consequently, a suit against yet another (smaller) player in the search market could come across as an attempt to just filch more cash from big dot-coms. Or, as the suit goes forward, Lambotte's claims, as represented by Kabateck, could show a legitimate foundation.

Search companies, meanwhile, announced a coalition against click fraud nearly two years ago in conjunction with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Media Rating Council.

Sprawling new-media conglomerate InterActiveCorp on Tuesday announced that it has acquired StarNet Interactive, an Israel-based company that operates GirlSense, a social site for teen girls. More specifically, GirlSense describes itself as "online dress-up games for girls with fashion sense."

Terms of the deal, which is part of IAC's Consumer Applications and Portals division, were not disclosed.

Other teen-oriented properties in IAC's arsenal, with which GirlSense will likely be intertwined, include virtual world Zwinky and profile customization site Webfetti. GirlSense counts its registered users at 13 million.

"Part of our growth strategy includes acquisition of products and companies that complement our core competencies," John Park, president and CEO of IAC Consumer Applications & Portals, said in a statement Tuesday. "Adding Girlsense.com to our existing teen-targeted product portfolio provides us with broader teen mindshare and access to the coveted tween demographic."

The ad-supported GirlSense--advertisements are currently served by women's-focused ad network Glam Media--is also aligned with IAC's broader restructuring.

Late last year, the company announced that it would be splitting into five separate corporations as an attempt to center its operations on ad-supported media rather than retail or financial services. And after lying low through the spin-off process and a boardroom battle, the Barry Diller-helmed IAC appears to be back on track with its historically aggressive acquisition strategy.

Last week, IAC's Ask.com division acquired the parent company of Dictionary.com.

Just how much does Ask.com own the word "Ask?" Enough to have a problem with a question-and-answer site called "Askpedia," apparently. Representatives from the start-up Askpedia.com told CNET News.com that the search engine's parent company, InterActiveCorp, sent a cease-and-desist letter earlier this month, citing intellectual property violations in the name "Askpedia."

"(This) is likely to cause consumer confusion, particularly inasmuch as Askpedia purports to provide online informational services that are substantially similar to those provided by Ask," the letter dated March 13 reads. "In using and incorporating Ask's intellectual property in this manner, Askpedia is falsely suggesting a connection between Ask and Askpedia, and thereby misappropriating the substantial good will associated with Ask's trademarks."

IAC representatives were contacted to verify the contents of the cease-and-desist letter, but were not immediately available for comment.

Ask.com's trademark on the name was first filed April 28, 1999, when the company was still known as Ask Jeeves and had not yet been acquired by the Barry Diller-helmed IAC in 2005. These days, the search engine has been undergoing a restructuring process in order to handle its tepid market share.

The letter, signed by Edward T. Ferguson, IAC senior vice president and general counsel, and provided to CNET News.com by Askpedia representatives, goes on to request that Askpedia "cease and desist from all use of Ask's trademarks and other intellectual property, including without limitation in the name 'Askpedia' or any similar formation using the word 'ask,'" and agree not to do so in the future.

A deadline of 10 days was provided, meaning that IAC would presumably seek legal action after Sunday, March 23.

Yong Su Kim, CEO of Askpedia, which describes itself as "a knowledge marketplace for questions and answers" and awards cash prizes to the best answers, said that his small start-up has about 100,000 registered users. He sent an e-mail to CNET News.com in which he speculated that "our guess is that their lawyers have nothing better to do."

Kim continued, "Either that or they're working on a Wikipedia-like service and want the domain name and trademark."