MySpace’s recent reorientation to emphasize entertainment over friends makes it more similar to Twitter than Facebook, said News Corp Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. “Twitter is about asymmetrical relationships,” said Miller, while Facebook users have mostly symmetrical friend relationships. “MySpace is in between. One of the things we have to focus on right now is you have to declare a major.” Continue »

Social networking has generally been discouraged in the workplace, with many corporate IT departments blocking access to sites like Facebook and MySpace due to privacy concerns. But these efforts are becoming increasingly futile as our lives continue to converge with social networks, analysts at a Gartner symposium said yesterday. Plus, social networking may even help workers “feel valued, a part of a community, and earn the respect of peers.” Privacy concerns surrounding social networks were brought up at our NewNet Bunker Series, where participants debated whether we should keep our data holed up in walled gardens or leave it open for developers to build upon. (Replay the event and read our live-blogging notes on GigaOM Pro, subscription required.) Continue »

TweetDeck has released an updated version of its desktop application that includes features aimed at helping users get the information that matters most to them. The app, which helps you manage your Facebook, Twitter and MySpace accounts by letting you organize updates from those social sites within columns, is among the most popular social media-focused apps on the web (and a favorite of ours at GigaOM). Continue »

Social networking and the real-time web are changing how information on the Internet is consumed, as the ability to disperse and share information through social platforms and do it using real-time tools is shifting the focus of content from “historical” news to real-time events. Such a shift is giving rise to what we’re calling the NewNet, and it will impact everyone with a business presence online. As part of our GigaOM Pro subscription research service, we’ve compiled a look at the major trends and emerging issues for this next-generation version of the Internet in a third-quarter wrap-up.

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Adobe partnered with Gigya, a social widget maker, to offer a new service that lets advertisers and developers easily share their Flash-based applications across social, mobile and desktop platforms. The service, available today and called Flash Platform Services for Distribution, will enable developers to track and monetize their applications. As a result of the partnership, developers can add a button to their application and share it across 70 social networks and web destinations, including Facebook, MySpace and iGoogle.

However, Adobe is tardy in its effort to offer this capability, as companies like Clearspring already tout widgets and applications in Flash.  Plus, Facebook opened up its API to developers in 2007, so the rush of developers looking to build apps on the social network has dried up over the years. Continue »

MySpace said today that it’s rolling out a new feature in beta that lets U.S. users sync status updates in their Twitter feed and profile page on the social network, symbolizing MySpace’s efforts to piggyback off of the micro-messaging service’s growing popularity. The syncing function will let people cross-post their status updates from either Twitter or MySpace. When users post their status updates to Twitter, a link posted alongside the tweet will direct people back to MySpace. Continue »

People are spending less time on communication sites that are focused around email and instant messaging, according to an analysis released today by the Online Publishers Association, a trade organization, a decline it attributes to the rising popularity of social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Indeed, posting photos and videos to social networks is an easy way to engage people in your social graph and show them what’s going on in your life, and many feature their own built-in email and IM capabilities. And Facebook’s internal user engagement numbers back up the OPA’s findings; it claims some 1 billion chat messages are sent each day and 2 billion photos are uploaded to the site each month. Continue »