If you happen to read my other site, AllFacebook.com, then you possibly read my article from earlier today about our new “Holy Grail Of Facebook Privacy” Guide. As part of the benefits I listed out access to a new site that I’ve been working on for the past six months: New Media School. I privately launched the site a few months back to see how it would work and get some people talking in the forums. The test went pretty well but my launch strategy was not as effective and ultimately not well thought out.
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Last week we received confirmation of the rumors surrounding the MySpace layoffs, with the social networking company trimming its staff by 30% and releasing statements regarding its plans to restructure and focus on innovative products for its future. Today MySpace offers up more details surrounding its intent to restructure, stating that its international operations will be cut back in some regards as well.

MySpace will be refocusing its international operations around a smaller number of territories, with plans to “retain a robust global consumer presence,” according to the statement sent out by MySpace. While this plan is still subject to consultation with the international employees in various countries, MySpace is really looking to make a uniform move here across all the countries in which MySpace has a presence.
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I was shocked to hear a Social Data Cloud (SDC) is in full operation, created by Freedom OSS using Amazon Web Services (AWS) technology. CloudMQ is making social data available “in the cloud”, and all the major social networks are participating in the exchange.

Social Data Cloud (SDC)

Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn all publish data about changes occurring on their social graphs via CloudMQ. FriendFeed and other aggregators then subscribe to this data. Social networks can even subscribe to each others’ data. CloudMQ is the first Social Data Cloud (SDC), and is the beginning of a trend in which all social graph information will be made available real time, on a granular level “in the cloud”.

The emergence of this Social Data Cloud (SDC) raises important questions about user privacy, social network collaboration and future industry business models.

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Yesterday PaidContent posted an article stating that Coinstar is preparing to sell cards for games and applications on Facebook. The cards will enabled buyers “to use them for subscriptions and tokens on casual games sites, to buy goods in virtual worlds, as well as for massively multiplayer online games.” Yes, that’s Coinstar, the company which let’s you turn your spare change into credit at the grocery store. Apparently the company will sell the cards via the Pay As You go racks within Cumberland Farms grocery stores.

Check out the Coinstar release.

While unconfirmed, it’s being reported by several sources that MySpace is getting ready to undergo hefty layoffs to its company which currently employs around 2900 people. The large social network, part of Fox Interactive Media, has been struggling to maintain its dominance from a platform perspective, losing ground to other networks like Facebook in many areas of the world.
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Another big announcement from hi5 today: the social network is teaming up with Televisa in a commercial partnership with Televisa representing hi5’s online ad inventory for Spanish Latin America, and hi5 distributing Televisa’s video content through its new video channel on the social networking site.

No monetary details of the commercial partnership have been released, but the deal is exclusive between the two companies. Televisa reports significant growth on a global scale, while hi5 cites that Internet usage in Latin America has increased nearly 17% in the past year, making it one of the fastest growing Internet markets in the world.
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Can you build a community around a Facebook Public Profile, and will that help in your own blogging endeavors? Wibiya has created a service that is banking on the ability to do so, which has become an easier task given the continued updates to Fcebook’s platform, namely Facebook Connect.

Leveraging an existing fan base/community from Facebook in order to drive traffic and build up your own blog is a concept we support here at Social Times and AllFacebook, as it goes along with the marketing ideas put forth in some of our articles. But recent updates to Wibiya mean that the process of utilizing Facebook for your own purposes could be made that much easier.
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Many have tried to start a company that puts your Twitter status updates on a tee shirt, but the end results have been largely dismal. It’s a tricky concept to pin down in a revenue-generating model when you’re merely a third party service.

But Threadless may have figured something out. In partnership with Twitter, Threadless the company that made t-shirts social, launches Twitter Tees today. And the best thing about this new project is that it keeps the community around Twitter and Threadless intact.
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Drop.io has been very busy lately, and its latest release is designed for web collaborations. Present.io uses drop.io’s real-time XMPP media sharing foundation in order to provide real-time, web-based presentations in a very simple interface and process.

What makes this so simple? No downloads, no installations. Just sign on, invite others to join you, and you’re all set to go. Drop.io will give you a custom URL where you can select “presentation mode” in order to get started. As the presenter, you’ll be able to run your presentation as with most other web demo products.
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hi5 is expanding its gaming section with the addition of RockYou’s Pets game to all of its users. The RockYou Pet game has gained a steady following in its own right, so hi5 is seemingly looking to ramp up the offerings of its own game channel by layering in online activity that is sure to keep users around for extended periods of time, with game titles they already know and trust.

For RockYou, the new partnership means that hi5’s 63 million users will be able to access its gaming products. As one of the major application developers, RockYou has been among the first to create game apps for most of the major platforms, from Facebook to MySpace. So it’s no surprise to see RockYou reaching further with the new partnership with hi5.
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