You may have noticed that the site has been down this morning. There has also been connection issues over the past few months. I’ve now shifted Social Times to a new server and we will be back on a regular posting schedule. Let us know if you run into any problems with accessing the site.

MySpace Music just “officially” launched earlier this year in September, and it has unsurprisingly become an integral part in MySpace’s overall product map moving forward. To help steer that product map in the right direction is Courtney Holt, the newly appointed President of MySpace Music.

As a former Executive Vice President of Digital Music for the MTV Networks Music and Logo Group, Holt has worked with the music and the web-based aspects of both industries. Specifically, Holt has worked on several initiatives for engaging audiences online and offline–something he’ll likely bring to his new position as the MySpace Music President.
(more…)

If MySpace could help developers promote their applications to get more distribution, activity notifications in friends’ news feeds would be a great way to do it. Last night the company announced that they are rolling out the beta version of “application activities”. Currently these application activities will only be viewable to developers until at least “after the holidays”.
(more…)

Over the past month I’ve been doing a significant amount of development as I was rolling out the new Facebook application statistics service over at AllFacebook. Everything has been pretty smooth and I think I’ve created a pretty nice platform for building new tools on top of it in the near future. The only problem has been my hosting. Over the past month or two, my blogs have been overloading my server.
(more…)

Meebo, the online chat service that lets you log into all your instant messenger clients from a central location, has announced its agreement with Universal Music Group as its latest partner. This deal signifies a branding opportunity for both Meebo and UMG, as the music company will be able to distribute premium content through Meebo’s various services and enable users to share it with their friends from there.
(more…)

Like to play basketball? Then you probably won’t like the new iPhone app from SGN, called iBasketball. Even though it’s a fun game, it’s Wii-like movements with your iPhone aren’t good substitutes for the real game. I know that could be said about the majority of the Wii-like games made for the iPhone, but in testing the game out myself and speaking with a few other seasoned game players, the movement of shooting a basketball with the iPhone is a little more drastic than say, bowling.

Are mobile game makers over-doing the apps that require movement mimicking the real sport? Is the mobile market really the best venue for such games, seeing as there are a limited number of places in which most people will feel comfortable “throwing” their phones around in the act of playing basketball?
(more…)

At Web 2.0 Summit a couple weeks ago, John Battelle asked Mark Zuckerberg about a potential acquisition of Twitter. Zuckerberg essentially avoided the question and Caroline McCarthy, suggested such a notion was ludicrous. This morning, Kara Swisher revealed that acquisitions discussions were actually taking place but eventually ended in failure.
(more…)

Obama was one of the first politicians to really leverage online social media to its full potential during his campaign for the presidential election, so you’ve got to admit that he knows a thing or two about maintaining an online reputation.  And now that Obama is the president elect, he expects the rest of his administration to disclose some of their online information, according to an article in the New York Times. 

In a 7-page questionnaire, prospective White House employees will need to list their aliases and handles used to communicate on the Internet, among other expected questions pertaining to government new hires.  Now, communicate is a broad term, especially when it comes to the Internet.  For the questionnaire’s purpose, it even includes names used for comments posted on blogs and websites.  Not only is that a daunting task, depending on your level of online activity, but it also crosses a privacy line that has not yet been addressed on this political level. 
(more…)

In a relatively surprising turn of events, MySpace experienced over 400,000 downloads of their application among Blackberry’s in the first week. According to MySpae this is the most downloads in the first week for both RIM and MySpace. Over 15 million messages were sent and received and over 2 million statuses and moods were updated.
(more…)

Mufin, the music search and recommendation engine that suggests music based on an algorithmic analysis of music, has launched its public beta today. Of course, the biggest point of interest is the lack of human editing when it comes to Mufin’s recommendations, setting it apart from the likes of Last.fm and Pandora. Even though many systems such as web search queries have been after the all mighty algorithm that works as well as (if not better than) a human, none have really come close to replacing the human element.

Granted, Mufin’s recommendations do work rather well. Perhaps this is because matching music can be more readily turned into a mathematical representation than say a search query for the best restaurants in Union Square. But Mufin seems to lack the human touch in its entirety. There’s no tweaking you can do for the recommendations Mufin offers, indicating how well of a match a song really is. And the social implications on Mufin’s main site are minimal, limited to a top playlist of songs that have been viewed, searched or played by others.
(more…)