Music pirates can be deterred by warnings from their internet service provider (ISP), suggests a survey.

Almost 75% of music pirates would stop if told to by their ISP, the survey of 1,500 UK consumers found.

The research looked at the digital habits of consumers and found that the abundance of online music services was convincing many to go straight.
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The leader of a youth movement that swept the world this past year by encouraging Web users to share bits of their lives with selected friends spoke on Wednesday of spreading his service across the Web, even while apologizing for past excesses.

Mark Zuckerberg, 24, told an audience of 1,000 industry executives, software makers, media — and his mother and father — at Facebook’s annual conference of how the company’s features will run on affiliated sites outside its own.
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Popular social networking site MySpace said Tuesday it will join the open source authentication platform OpenID, further bolstering the idea of a unified system to carry online identities between Web sites. But for now, MySpace’s OpenID accounts cannot be used elsewhere.

OpenID has already been embraced by nearly 8,000 sites, including Yahoo (the largest supporter in terms of users), Plaxo, Wetpaint, Technorati, and LiveJournal. But MySpace is the second largest site to join the network to date, and will nearly double the amount of OpenID accounts to a half-billion. Although, because MySpace doesn’t require e-mail verification, many of its accounts may not be legitimate. continue

Facebook today is beginning to roll out a redesign aimed at simplifying the site and giving users more control over their profiles. The new version of the site has been in the works for some time now, and Ars Technica went hands-on to see how social and private the new design really is.

Announced in a press release, Facebook’s new design is slowly being rolled out to its 80 million users over the next few days. If you can’t wait to check it out for yourself, though, you can visit www.new.facebook.com with a registered account to gain access now. continue

Social networking giant MySpace is set to receive $6 million for a lawsuit the company filed against “Spam King” Scott Richter, who inundated its members with unwanted spam from hijacked accounts in August 2006.Specifically, an arbitrator decided Friday that Richter and his company, Media Breakaway, was to fork over $4.8 million in fines and a $1.2 million in legal fees to MySpace for the case that originated in January 2007.

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - News Corp’s (NWSa.N: Quote, Profile, Research) MySpace plans a global redesign next week in an attempt to widen its demographics and boost user engagement on the site, the social networking site said on Friday. In what it said would be the largest scale relaunch of a website of its size, MySpace will change its home page, navigation, profile editing, search, and MySpaceTV player facilities. Other changes will come during the summer.

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NEW YORK — Online social networking today is more about hanging out with friends behind gated communities than exploring the World Wide Web: Visit another site and you’ll have to rebuild your profile from scratch.

That’s like having to get a new driver’s license for every state you drive through.

Although the walls that keep users from taking their data wherever they go are starting to erode, how much three recently announced programs will help users move among the networks remains to be seen. Google’s attempt to break those fortifications was quickly blocked by Facebook.

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Google CEO Eric Schmidt has advised sceptics convinced of the limitations of search engine marketing that his company still has plenty ideas for improving the technology and targeting advertising more effectively. In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung he predicted that the mobile internet would be the next major advertising platform. The iPhone was the first mobile device with a good web browser, said Schmidt, and more such devices will follow. Advertising will then become very personal, he continued. In a few years, mobile advertising will generate more revenue than advertising on the normal web.

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A growing number of mobile phone subscribers worldwide are taking online social networking to the streets, research conducted by Nielsen reveals.

The findings, released by Nielsen Mobile, a service of Nielsen show that the UK leads Europe in mobile social networking on a percentage basis — with the US boasting comparable numbers.

In the UK, approximately 810,000 mobile subscribers, or 1.7 per cent of all mobile subscribers in the country, visited social networking websites on their mobile phones in the first quarter of 2008.
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News Corp.-owned social-networking site MySpace has announced a new initiative called Data Availability, a way for members to share profile data with other social and community sites across the Web.

Co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe, Chief Operating Officer Amit Kapur, and vice president of technology Jim Benedetto announced the new development in a press call Thursday. DeWolfe called it “an innovative offering to empower the global MySpace community to share their public profile content and data to Web sites of choice throughout the Internet.”

Inaugural partners in the project are Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket (also owned by News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media), and Twitter. The program, available to MySpace’s users worldwide, will be rolling out to a full version in the coming weeks.

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Chief executive Stephen Stokols explains his big ambitions for the site.

Woome’s co-founders Stephen Stokols, George Berkowski and Steven Sesar

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Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried build on Bree’s popularity on MySpace and YouTube to launch Eqal.

The group behind Lonelygirl15 — a fictitious video blog that drew millions of viewers who bought into the story — announced a “social entertainment” production company.

Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried announced through a blog that they received venture capital funding to produce shows that spawn Internet communities and online interaction. The company, Eqal, is said to have drawn $5 million in Series A venture funding through Spark Capital, according to an article in The Washington Post. Investors include Ron Conway and Marc Andreessen.

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