As MySpace has lost ground to Facebook and other competitors in the social networking world, it's increasingly focused on something it's always done well: music. Being a musician on MySpace just got a lot easier, thanks to new analytics features that give you a better picture of who's visiting your site and listening to your music. On top of that, MySpace has also worked out a deal with several prominent record labels to put a huge archive of music videos online.

On the new Artist Dashboard, artists can check out the demographics of their fanbase, including a breakdown of age, gender and location. The Dashboard also includes pageviews and song plays over time, and integrates information from iLike, which MySpace acquired earlier this year.

Music videos are now a much bigger part of MySpace. On top of the new video archive, music videos will show up in an artist's MySpace Player if they're available. Of course, MySpace has found a way to monetize the heck out the video business, including plenty of ads. Still, it's nice to have another large stash of music videos online, and it might include some that you can't easily find on YouTube.

[via TechCrunch]

With more social networks turning into lifestreaming platforms, it makes sense that we're seeing Twitter integration for a growing number of social sites and services. MySpace is the latest big player to get Twitter syncing, with both one-way and two-way options. MySpace may be showing up a little late to this party, though, with services like Facebook and AIM already able to feed into Twitter.

You can plug your accounts in using OAuth, and your posts from MySpace will show "from MySpace," just like any other Twitter client. Syncing also works with the mobile versions of both sites. Twitter might win bigger than MySpace, here. All MySpace gets is an attempt to keep up with Facebook and other competitors who have already embraced Twitter, while Twitter gets more exposure with the younger demographic that some say it's had trouble attracting.

MySpace made two big moves in its music business this week, purchasing social music service iLike (which just launched an mp3 store) and shutting off that annoying autoplay feature for profile songs. Both of these decisions seem pretty savvy, and might help turn around MySpace's image as a dying site.

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.

With the rise of social networking profiles and photo sharing sites, people are putting more photos of themselves online than ever. Retouching, Photoshopping and the infamous "MySpace angle" have all done wonders to make people look better in photos, and now we can add PicTreat to that list. It's a fast, easy way to give yourself a perfect complexion ... on the web, anyway.

PicTreat removes red eye and blemishes and adjusts brightness/contrast and color levels. A basic user of Photoshop could do the same thing, but Pictreat does it very quickly, and then gives you the option to upload the photo to several social sites. You can use PicTreat without registering, but you can also get an account, or sign in using Facebook Connect or MySpace.

Despite all the buzz about the death of MySpace and its future as a more music-focused site that's given up on competing with Facebook, the social networking site is still around and rolling out new features.

The latest is MySpace Mail, which seems to be a full-on webmail service, @myspace.com email addresses and all. The rollout of MySpace Mail started on Thursday and should be available to everyone well before the end of the year.

Maybe MySpace is smart to get into the webmail game, considering the large userbase they'll start with right out of the gate. MySpace's appeal to the younger demographic means that @myspace.com could be the primary email domain for a huge number of kids and teens.

Bands could also use it to send email blasts to their MySpace contacts instead of just messaging within the site. Even if most people won't replace their existing email address with a MySpace one, don't underestimate the marketing potential of using MySpace to send messages to people who aren't on the site. MySpace.com could become the Internet's biggest source of indie-band spam.

[via CNET]

I'll admit I felt a little dirty after visiting MySpace for the first time in years, but I had a good reason. There's an announcement up at www.myspace.com/Windows with some good news for free music fans.

In partnership with ReverbNation, they're giving away more than 1,000 free MP3 / M4A audio tracks. The goodies are all available at www.reverbnation.com/windows, and unlike a lot of massive audio giveaways there are plenty of good tracks to be had.

I was excited to find tracks from Skindred, Bif Naked, Fishbone, and Reverend Horton Heat (among others). While my taste in music might not jive with yours, don't fret - there's plenty to choose from. You can view the whole catalog or browse by genre - Alternative, Electronic/Dance, Hip Hop, Jazz, Latin, Pop, and Rock.

I'm never one to argue with good, free music, even if it means having to visit MySpace once in a while. Want to stay in the loop? Add Windows as a friend on MySpace - or just check back every so often if you'd rather not blow the dust off your profile.

Bozeman, Montana -- a city just 5 miles to the east of freakin' nowhere -- as part of a more thorough set of background checks, is asking job applicants to, "list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc."

Federal law states that you can't ask about religion or marital status when interviewing you for a job, but both of those things are conveniently available in most Facebook profiles. Added to which, giving a prospective employer all your logins and passwords gives them access to direct and private messages, and in the case of most social networks, indirect access to the information of other people who never granted the city access. The whole thing violates just about every social network's Terms of Service, and just generally feels slimy.

In an interview with local news, the city's attorney says it isn't "trying to find out all kinds of information about the person that we're not able to use or shouldn't use in the hiring process."

Current job listings for Bozeman include a Water/Sewer technician so, presumably, with a high school diploma and a clean Facebook record, you could get hired to dig around in something that smells almost as bad as this hiring policy.

[via BoingBoing]

There are a lot of ways to download videos from YouTube, a lot of ways to convert those videos, and a lot of ways to download music from MySpace. I'm used to thinking of all that as requiring a few different apps or web-based tools, but Farkie does it all. Farkie aims to be the only downloader you need for videos, music, flash games and other media on websites, and it's even got a Firefox add-on.

To use Farkie, you just have to paste the URL of the page you want to download from into Farkie's form, and let it do the rest. You'll get a list of all the media on the page (and check boxes for file types, so you can filter if there's a lot there), and you can download any of the available files via links.

It can even convert YouTube videos for you, into wmv, m4v, mov, and a bunch of other formats.

Flock is a web browser that's based on Mozilla. But what really makes it stand out is the integration with social networking services including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube. Flock 2.5 is out today, and it adds enhanced features for Twitter and Facebook, including:

• Read Twitter replies (err... @mentions) in the Flock sidebar
• Save Twitter searches
• Take actions like replying or clicking on Twitter links from the sidebar
• Use Facebook chat from any web page
• Drag and drop web content into the Facebook chat box to share it

There's also a new feature called FlockCast so that when you post a tweet, set your MySpace status, write a blog post, or upload pictures to Flickr, you can click a button to automatically post those actions to Facebook as well.

It's fairly difficult to muster up sympathy for Facebook's management when it comes to the current user revolt over changes to the site's terms and conditions of use (or T&Cs as they are commonly know). After all we've seen it all before, anyone remember lefty singer songwriter Billy Bragg's 2006 MySpace Revolution? Putting aside the irony that it's likely that the MySpace revolution is the only one that Billy Bragg will ever lead, the 2006 Revolt was a blueprint for Facebook's 2009 controversy.

Back in 2006 MySpace changed its T&Cs to provide for an ongoing license to any content posted on the service as they saw fit, fast forward to 2009 and Facebook has done substantially the same thing. Back in 2006 an activist user revolt lead by Bragg forced a turnaround from MySpace, fast forward to 2009 and (absent Billy Bragg) Facebook has done exactly the same thing.

So, what were they thinking at Facebook? Why would a massively successful site show such a disrespect for its users?

While people may put up with the most draconian clauses drafted into the T&Cs for Windows Vista or Adobe Acrobat, generally because they never read them and they couldn't change them if they wanted to, when it comes to online media and the Web things are different. Facebook users should be concerned about the T&Cs, they constitute the terms of the contract between Facebook and its users and is a legally binding document. In an ideal world contracts for services should be negotiated between the parties, in the case of most Web sites and software companies that rarely happens, but this time the users have struck back and are now appear to be collectively negotiating that contract through online activism.

The drafting of Terms and Conditions for Web sites is a tricky business, lawyers must weigh up the potential risks of litigation against the possibility that the terms and conditions will sufficiently turn off users from using the site. When it comes to social media sites there is another significant concern – that users will revolt, start discussion groups, stop posting photos of their cats, and make statements to the media that generate poor publicity for the site.

Lawyers for social media sites need to have a nuanced understanding of the site's fundamental business and pay attention to risks that might impact the business both inside and outside the courtroom.

Given that Facebook would have been well aware of the MySpace case, a cynical observer might suggest that the manner in which Facebook clearly highlighted the changes to the T&C showed that Facebook's management was well aware of the possibility of a user revolt and that their subsequent response would have been mapped out in advance. Facebook's subsequent response to revert back to the previous T&C an to enter into a process of consultation

Users have good reason to be worried about large corporations infringing on their IP rights or privacy. How many users would want to be featured in a Facebook tie up with US Magazine of top ten of "Facebook Funniest Drunken Party Photos" or see their "25 Random Things About Me" reprinted without permission or compensation in an
"Official Facebook 25 Things" book?

Given the dominance of Facebook in the social media world it seems unlikely that this hiccup will only result in the cancellation of a tiny number of hardcore users while at the same time continuing to generate headlines and page views for the site. Facebook and other social media sites need to establish exactly how far they can go when
it comes to the user generated content that drives their world and ensure that lawyers don't kill the golden goose by overreaching and draconian T&Cs. Ultimately Facebook needs to understand that when it comes to user generated content people do actually care and show some respect.

If you spend more time in Gmail than Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn, but still want to know what your contacts on those social networks are up to, NutshellMail can help. When you sign up for a free account, you can associate it with your account on various social networking sites, and then you can designate how frequently you want to receive updates. Want to know if you've received new friend requests, group invitations, or if your friends birthdays are coming up? NutshellMail can shoot you an email with that information every hour, once a week, or anywhere in between.

You can also use NutShellMail to connect your email accounts. For example, you can have the service forward a list of messages in your Gmail inbox to your work email address every few hours if you want to keep up with your Gmail while you're at work without actually logging into Gmail.

[via Mashable]

OpenID is a really great concept. The ability to use a single digital identity across the web and avoid having to sign up for yet another user account is a real productivity boon. More and more high profile sites and services are adopting OpenID, but the project still hasn't gained the traction that many of us think it deserves. This is partially because it still isn't easy to use OpenID -- or even find out if a site supports OpenID -- on all services. MySpace, Flock and Vidoop think they've come across a solution: let the browser handle it.

Back in June, MySpace announced support for OpenID and also became an OpenID provider. In order to help users more easily manage their online identity across other sites and services, MySpace teamed up with Flock and Vidoop to create OpenID for Flock, available today at https://extensions.flock.com. OpenID for Flock is an open source plugin, part of the larger Identity in the Browser (IDIB) project which is focused on having the browser, not the user handle, authenticate and mange multiple user identities.

I had the chance to demo the plugin yesterday and it is pretty cool. Essentially, once installed an OpenID icon appears on the right of Flock's chrome bar. The extension scans a page for OpenID compatibility, and if a site supports OpenID, the icon starts to glow. You can then automatically choose to populate the OpenID fields with your designated OpenID URL or associate that site with a specific OpenID account. You can manage all of your OpenIDs, choose what sites to associate certain profiles with and view the login history and OpenID-to-site-relationship with each site.

Download Squad isn't alone when it comes to awesome redesigns -- today, Weblogs Inc.'s parent company, AOL, launched a totally redesigned AOL.com. It looks pretty great, especially when you compare it to the other portal offerings from Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. The biggest change comes in the form of allowing direct access to outside content -- including e-mail providers like Yahoo and Gmail, social networks like Facebook and MySpace and links to non AOL sites via a new RSS reader built into the site.

I had the opportunity to talk to James Clark, the VP of the AOL.com portal, about the redesign process, both from a business and web development level, as well as ways AOL is hoping to use the newly designed page to help transform the AOL brand.

Redesigning a site of any scale can be a challenge, but redesigning a site that receives over a billion PVs a month opens up an entirely new set of both business and user challenges. Starting in 2007, the AOL team started doing research on how its competitors display the web and more importantly, how end users (not necessarily AOL users, just Internet users) use the Internet. James told me that what they found was that the "one size fits all portal was outdated and outmoded." In this day and age, even traditional AOL users get content from multiple services and expect a level of control that traditional portals just don't give them.

Last month, AOL addressed those needs by implementing the ability to check and view e-mail from other providers -- like Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail -- directly from the AOL.com page, the same way AOL users can access AOL mail. Today's redesign continues with that trend, offering access to MySpace, Facebook, and AIM (Twitter and Bebo support will be complete very soon) all from AOL.com. You can even update all profiles simultaneously directly from the toolbar.

Additionally, users can add their own links to pages right at the top of the screen (and you don't even have to register or login to access any of this stuff -- not even Google will let you customize stuff without logging in with a Google account). Probably the coolest feature is at the bottom of the home page. AOL has integrated an RSS reader into the page. It comes preloaded with categories and websites, but you can add your own categories and your own sites. Even more interesting, the sites aren't just AOL properties. In the Tech section, for instance, CNET, TechCrunch, Slashdot and Wired are all listed -- and none of those sites are affiliated with AOL.

After months of planning, MySpace has rolled out MySpace Music, a new advertising-supported streaming audio service backed by the four major music labels.

There are a few things that make MySpace Music worth checking out. You can stream all the songs for free. And you can add songs to a custom playlist and post that list to your MySpace profile, making it easy for people to find new music. And finally, if you find a song you like, but you want to play it on a portable device or when your computer isn't connected to the internet, you can click the Buy button in the player to purchase the a DRM-free copy of the track from Amazon MP3.

But I'm still not particularly impressed. I was able to find MySpace pages for most of the artists I searched for. But not every song was available for purchase from Amazon. And for many artists you could find one or two albums, but not every album, and certainly not every song.

Since MySpace Music is basically a streaming audio website, it's hard not to compare it to similar services like Last.fm or even SeeqPod. And I have to say, while the audio player is nice, and the social aspect could be useful, the music selection isn't very impressive.