Last night MySpace Music went live and I’ve spent the morning playing around with the new service. The most important thing about this new service is that it is built on top of MySpace’s existing music service. There are a number of competing services when it comes to MySpace music and the most obvious are iLike and imeem. MySpace Music aims to be the top social music service.

In exchange for granting the music labels ownership in the new venture, MySpace is paying a discounted amount on each song that’s streamed. It’s not a bad model but such a system has never been tested before. Just like all the other leaders in digital music, MySpace is trying to figure out how to successfully navigate the space. With MySpace music comes two new key features: personal playlists and song purchases.

Personal Playlists

One of the key new features is personal playlists. For the first time, users will be able to create personalized playlists from all the songs in the MySpace Music directory and listen to those playlists on demand. They will play full songs with no limits. This is a huge step forward from what already exists and it’s a large step in what many consider to be the shift toward free on-demand music available everywhere.

Whether or not personal playlists accomplish that has yet to be seen. What also has yet to be seen is whether or not the number of songs sold will cover the total cost of playing all the songs for free. Part of the cost is being subsidized by advertisements which are displayed next to the music players but the model remains unproven.

Personal Playlist Player

Song Downloads

Songs will now be available for purchase. While not all songs are currently available (such as the ones included in the screenshot below), many will be immediately accessible via Amazon’s MP3 service. Not only will artists be able to sell their music but they will also be able to sell tickets and merchandise to fans.

Amit Kapur was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying “We’re not only going to be their home on the Web, we’re going to be the place they make a living.”

Updated Music Player

Conclusion

It’s unclear as to whether or not this is really going to solve the problems facing the music industry. For the most part it appears that this new service simply highlights the massive problems facing the industry as a whole. For now we will have to wait and see if it works. Thankfully, while we’re waiting we can go listen to as much free music as our hearts desire.

Earlier this week MySpace announced that they have released support for OpenSocial 0.8. The service will also be backwards compatible which means existing applications will still run on the platform as-is. With the release of OpenSocial 0.8 MySpace is also announcing a few new features including:

• New Permission Model (”OpenCanvas”) - Similar to Facebook who lets users visit an application prior to adding it, the new permission model will “allow users to control whether or not applications can read their Basic Info on the canvas page without having to intall or ‘add’ the application.”
• Upload Photos - In this new release, developers will be able to upload photos directly to a user’s photo albums. This is something Facebook has been offering since the launch of their platform. MySpace has finally added this feature.
• Publish Activities - Developers will now be able to publish the activities of users within applications to friends of a given application user. These activities are published through MySpace’s relatively new feed feature.

There are a few other notes that MySpace published in their blog post about the updates so check it out if you’d like to know more details. Given that MySpace is the largest implementation of OpenSocial, this is a pretty big deal for OpenSocial as a whole. hi5 was the first to support the new OpenSocial version but many developers have complained that the new implementation isn’t fully functional.

I’m sure MySpace developers will be pleased with this update. Having activities published also adds a new viral channel to the MySpace platform. I’m guessing that developers will take advantage of this immediately.

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On the heels of the MySpace Music launch, MySpace has launched a self-service advertising site which appears to be targeted specifically toward musicians. You can access the service by visiting advertise.myspace.com. The site functions similarly to Facebook’s advertising solution except that advertisers can create custom banners that are either 728×90 or 300×250.

The service also provides targeting by gender, age, location, and specific interest categories. The current categories are Auto, Books, Fashion, Health & Fitness, Miscellaneous, Movies, Music, Sports, Television, and Video Games. Rather than typing specific keywords, advertisers are forced to select from a pre-defined set of “Genres” within each category.

As the demographics are refined, the total number of users targeted is updated with an accurate estimate of the number of people that the advertisement will be visible to. Campaigns are run on a cost per click basis rather than a cost per impression basis. Users can also specify the dates that the campaigns are run during.

Advertisers then proceed to set up an account or user their existing advertiser account. These accounts are separate from other MySpace accounts. While all the ad templates were targeted at bands, it appears that anybody could use this new service. We will update this page with any statements from MySpace.

Note
You may want to be careful which browser you access the site in. The page crashed my Firefox but it seemed to run smoothly in Safari.

MySpace Ads Homepage

Ad Template Selection Page

Ad Creation Page

Ad Targeting Page

Last week MySpace announced the launch of the MyDebates site which takes politics on social networks to a new level. There is an interactive quiz which lets users see where they stand on issues in relation to each of the candidates. There is also a section which lets users see results of the polls. So far the results are definitely interesting with 45 of 50 states going to Barack Obama according to the latest poll.

While I don’t know the exact statistics on the people that took the quiz, it appears that the 21-34 years olds appear to have the most influence over the poll currently. One of the coolest features of the site is that there will be live coverage of the national debates and the ability to talk with others that are following the debate as they happen.

I actually found the poll to be extremely useful for judging my position although I wasn’t completely surprised by the results. Social networks are rapidly becoming a central place for political discussion. Just last week CNN covered how Facebook is being used to encourage users to register to vote:

“We need your help more than ever,” the Obama campaign said in a Facebook update Thursday which touted an updated version of the campaign’s application on the popular social networking site. The revised application is now headlined by a large module that allows users to check whether they are registered to vote, to request an absentee ballot, and to locate their polling place. The new module replicates functionality available on a Web site launched by the Obama campaign soon after the Republican convention.

The Obama camp’s effort to encourage registration and absentee voting on Facebook comes less than a day after the McCain camp rolled out its own application on the site to encourage its supporters to vote early or obtain absentee ballots.

“Now more than ever, your vote is critical,” the McCain-Palin update said. “Voting early, or with an absentee ballot, is the best way to avoid the long line on Election Day and get your vote counted.” The new McCain application takes users to a page on the campaign’s Web site where they can fill out a form to request an absentee ballot or register to vote.

While it’s difficult to measure the impact of political activities on the various social networks, it’s clear that both parties are taking social networks seriously as they demand a large portion of young voters’ attention. It will be interesting to see how much traffic is generated to these sites as the Presedential debates take place over the coming weeks.

At CTIA in San Francisco today, MySpace announced that they will soon launch an application for the Blackberry. Facebook launched a Blackberry application almost one year ago and now attracts over 1.3 million monthly users to the application. The MySpace application includes messaging (including comments and bulletins), status updates, friend requests, photo integration, and the ability to view events.

This sounds like a fairly robust application but the real question is whether the demographics of Blackberry users and MySpace users overlap. Most business professionals that I know are not active MySpace users, instead they tend to prefer Facebook. There’s a good chance that hundreds of thousands if not more than a million individuals with blackberries will decide to install this application.

MySpace currently enjoys a larger reach in the United States than Facebook which means that there is a good chance that just as many users may end up installing the MySpace application. MySpace has been increasing their focus on the mobile space as they just recently announced the launch of MySpace Mobile for all European Union countries.

It’s interesting to see MySpace targeting a demographic which would traditionally be considered business users. MySpace has been known for having a younger user base which are more focused on entertainment and music. According to MySpace’s press statement, the mobile version of MySpace already attracts more than two million daily unique visits.

I’d expect to see continued growth in the social networking mobile space over the next 24 months as the mobile landscape domestically catches up to the rest of the world.

Today Gigya announced that the company’s Socialize service will begin granting access to the API on Facebook and will integrate with MySpace later this month. The company is trying to bridge the gap for social application developers that are forced to spend time porting their Facebook applications to MySpace. Theoretically this implies that Gigya is also building a connector between OpenSocial and Facebook.

The service also competes directly with Google Friend Connect in that users can access their friends on any site that uses Socialize. Honestly, I’m not quite sure how significant of an announcement this is since the real challenge is sparking developer adoption. All the leading widget platforms enjoy boasting about the impressions that they have (such as Gigya has more than 150 million people that see their widgets each month) but few boast about developer adoption.

This has been a serious challenge for all the widget platforms and will most likely continue to be an issue as larger brands like Facebook and MySpace have been successful at individually attracting a substantial developer base. Another question I have about this new service is whether or not websites cater to both the MySpace and Facebook user bases.

I’d imagine that most developers that integrate with the social graph APIs (Facebook Connect, MySpace Data Availability and Google Friend Connect), will simply select the platform of their choosing. Gigya claims that they already have access to 50 million contacts since the launch of their Socialize service. The main purpose is to organize your friend lists across social networks in a single place.

Their are numerous services which provide similar aggregation services yet many have failed to take off as most users prefer to stick with the big brands: Facebook and MySpace. There is potential for this service to gain traction but for now I remain skeptical. Personally I don’t believe that the solution is to create a temporary offering which bridges the gap.

Now that a company has already done so, there is a decreasing advantage for Facebook and MySpace to remain disconnected. It will be interesting to see if services like the one Gigya announced today will be a catalyst for the progression of data portability.

Statement from Gigya
“Socialize enables website owners to add social features to web sites by making it easy for them to give their user’s access to their friend lists on Facebook and MySpace as well as webmail services. Socialize is not a tool for porting Facebook applications to MySpace. Socialize gives website developers direct access to Gigya’s API for custom implementations, or they can choose to implement turnkey components, hence its direct competition with Google Friend Connect. The announcement is more in the realm of data portability than about OpenSocial and application platform standards. Socialize is a broadening of our product offering beyond widgets.”

At Techcrunch 50, Chris DeWolfe of MySpace announced that MySpace will begin enabling users to access their profiles offline thanks to integration with Google Gears. This feature will enable users to access a history of their profiles that they’ve had on MySpace. While no thorough details were provided it sounds like a system similar to the Wayback Machine which keeps a history of the crawlable web.

MySpace previously enabled gears for their inbox and enabled users to take their inbox offline, something Facebook has yet to do. They are now extending this feature according to Chris DeWolfe. I wish I could provide more details but unfortunately this is all that he said. It definitely sounds like an interesting feature in theory given that people change their profile so frequently.

After growing up on a social network, it would be extremely useful to look back at an archived version of your personal profile. This feature also highlights how important it is for users to monitor anything they place on their profile. While DeWolfe did not say that anybody can access a user’s archived profile, this is one more step in that direction.

It will be interesting to see how this new feature is implemented. Chris DeWolfe also said that MySpace music will be launching later this month.

Yesterday MySpace announced that they were officially shutting off the forums on the application profile pages. The biggest reason was spam. I had written about this issue previously as there were hate message being posted on a number of walls. Facebook applications have faced similar issues but apparently the spam reporting mechanisms on Facebook have been more effective.

What is MySpace telling developers to do now that their application forums are gone? Go download your own and moderate it! I’m not sure that this is the best solution but at least it shows that MySpace doesn’t have complete control over their spam situation. Spam has been an ongoing challenge for the social network and it appears that this time around the spammers have won.

Facebook on the other hand appears to have a relatively more efficient system which fights spam (as pictured below). While Facebook applications have to battle spam, it appears that the level of spam is far below MySpace or perhaps that the type of spam on Facebook is less offensive. These are broad generalizations though. What is clear is that MySpace will cut off the channels that spammers have access to instead of trying to institute system which filter them out.

According to this July’s comscore data the fastest growing locations for search are Facebook and MySpace. MySpace had 539 million searches and Facebook had 173 million and posted 20 and 10 percent growth, respectively. My guess is that these searches are only domestic searches which would account for the large difference. Whatever the case is these numbers are far below Google’s search volume which fell just under 10 billion searches for the month with 4 percent monthly growth.

Last week I suggested that Facebook has a huge search monetization opportunity and this solidifies that argument. Facebook has a ways to go before it catches up to the large search giants (aka Google) but they are almost a quarter of the size of AOL in terms of search and almost half the size of eBay which has a shopping system which is practically built on search.

As the Wall Street Journal higlighted today, search is dominating advertising with the most growth. The article suggests there is as an increasing gap between search an other advertising models (primarily banner). Social advertising is a new form of medium though so growth is hard to measure, especially since Facebook and other social networks don’t publicly release their ad revenue.

While MySpace and Facebook are searching for non-traditional advertising methods online, their quick path to profitability may be staring them in the face. Then again Google’s search deal with MySpace has been under-performing according to Google. This is troubling news considering that MySpace accounts for more searches then eBay, Craigslist, Facebook and Amazon at this point.

It will be interesting to see how the advertising battle plays out but given that social advertising is still such a nascent industry, one can only expect to see growth. We have seen a massive influx of new social advertising solutions and according to people I’ve been speaking with there are more that are about to hit the market.

While most of the market is out experimenting it may be time for Facebook and other large social networks to try what has worked for the past decade: search.

This afternoon MySpace announced the launch of the Hurricane News application which gives users updates on what is taking place with Hurricane Gustav. It’s a little delayed but it is great to see FEMA adopting tech savvy practices. The only problem with the new application? It doesn’t work. When you install the application it says “This application is currently pending review.”

If you want a way to go ahead and get a FEMA Gustav widget on your MySpace page, you can use the embed code provided on the Department of Homeland Security’s site. I’m guessing that MySpace will update this application shortly so that it’s working. You can try to install the application yourself by visiting www.myspace.com/hurricanenews. Let us know if you can get it to work!

MySpace will begin promoting the application on their site homepage later today. I’m guessing it will be working by then. There are a number of emergency related applications on Facebook currently but none of them have appeared to gain much traction. Honestly, I doubt that people will keep this application on their page beyond the next few days but it’s great to see FEMA adopting much better practices.

The organization was widely considered a failure three years ago following the Hurricane Katrina debacle. It looks like they’ve straightened up and now are much more prepared to respond to emergencies and distribute information throughout multiple channels including social networks.