Flip.com, the social network where teen girls can create online “flip books”, is being shut down by parent company Conde Naste, according to a recent Gawker report. Launched well over a year ago during the gilded age of old media building a plethora of social networks for the purpose of gaining traffic and eyeballs, Flip.com seemed doomed from the beginning.
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At least that’s what Michael Wolff, author of the Rupert Murdoch biography, “The Man Who Owns The News,” suggests. In a conversation with Jon Fine of BusinessWeek, Michael Wolff expresses his disdain for MySpace and suggests that News Corp executives are shaking in their boots. The company is according to Wolff, “looking at is the distinct possibility that it can go down to nothing.”
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Gannett announced its acquisition of white label social networking provider Ripple6 last week, continuing the shift of new media being further integrated into old media traditions.  Having created solutions for business and enterprises to layer in social media and networking capabilities for internal or consumer-facing solutions, Ripple6 has the technology that Gannett is interested in specifically for market research and marketing purposes. 
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It’s been a while since we’ve seen the launch of a social network aggregator, but alas Power.com has emerged into a public beta today, hoping to offer enough features to outshine similar services we’ve seen in the past. 

With $8 million in funding from investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and two years in stealth mode, Brazil-based Power.com has had enough foresight to do more than just update your status across Facebook and MySpace.  Rolling in Orkut and Hi5, along with a handful of multimedia sharing options for sites like YouTube and MetaCafe, Power.com looks at the whole of your social networking experience for its aggregation purposes.  That means that your messages are aggregated, along with groups’ activities, community updates, application changes, and more. 
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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.
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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”.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Today, Glam media announced the launch of GlamApps a service for advertisers to generate interactive content that publishers can leverage to generate revenue. The service also leverages OpenSocial, expanding the service to one of the largest blog networks on the web. Rather than have publishers create their own interactive tools, advertisers are encouraged to build their own services which bloggers can embed and then the advertiser can display ads on.
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