Filed under: Audio, Business, Social Software
MySpace makes music moves: buys iLike, kills autoplay
iLike will remain a separate service, but its new music store and its huge userbase on MySpace's biggest rival site, Facebook, could add up to a big win for MySpace. It shouldn't take all that long to make back the rumored $20 million MySpace spent on the acquisition. MySpace also thinks iLike could be expanded beyond music, into video and games. iLike's recommendation features could also be monetized somehow in the future.
Stopping autoplay might not seem like a business decision at first, but it really was. MySpace's streaming costs had grown to $10 million a month, and a significant portion of that came from songs that automatically started playing on user profiles. Getting rid of this feature has other advantages, too. The obvious one is a less annoying user experience, and the slightly less obvious is better data collection. Even if you hate your friends' profile songs, they still count as plays when they start automatically. For those who really love autoplay, there's now a preference to opt into it.
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So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
