Specific Media will acquire the fledgling social network turned social entertainment site for $35 million according to All Things D.

“Today, we are announcing that Myspace will be acquired by Specific Media, one of the world’s leading online media and advertising platforms,” Jones wrote in the email addressed to Myspacers. “Over the next few days you will be hearing from the team at Specific, including their CEO, Tim Vanderhook, regarding their exciting plans for Myspace and how it fits in with the overall vision of their company.”

Jones indicated in the email that a significant reduction in staff was imminent, adding that he would be stepping down as CEO of Myspace after assisting with the transition to Specific Media over the next two months.

$35 million seems like quite a bargain for Myspace, which was founded in 2003 and acquired two years later by Fox Interactive Media (part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.) for $580 million. If nothing else, Specific media comes away with 8 years of data encompassing the demographics and behavior of millions of users.

Since 2009 Myspace has laid off approximately 1,500 employees. The dilution of up to half of the remaining 400 employees, most based at Myspace’s Beverly Hills HQ, began Wednesday.

Several close friends of mine worked at Myspace in its final iteration, some of whom are featured in the Blogroll at right (Sean Percival, Mike Macadaan, Tony Adam). Percival, VP Online Marketing, tweeted earlier today: “Today is my last day with Myspace. It was a unique moment in time and an impossible problem to solve. Was proud to be a part of it.” He later blogged of his imminent return to startup world, where no doubt he’ll continue to have great success and growth. SEO-meister Tony Adam blogged that he’ll be carrying on with his startup Visible Factors. Congrats all and best of luck on whatever’s next!

Personally, I’ve had a Myspace profile seemingly forever, having joined at some point in 2004, having sensed early tremors of the first tectonic shift in social networking — the great exodus from Friendster to MySpace. I never used it much socially, especially after the great fake pornorific inbox spammings of 2006… I had already begun using Facebook at the time, gaining early-ish entry while a grad student.

Companies across the tech landscape immediately began reaching out with job offers to Myspace engineers and developers about to enter the tech talent pool.

Myspace was the primary social network of choice for more than 100 million users and became a successful vehicle for the promotion and discovery of music artists. But in 2007 Facebook opened up to users outside of universities and soon eclipsed Myspace in popularity. By 2008 Myspace’s user base had stagnated while Facebook is now approaching 700 million users worldwide.

Irvine-based Specific Media is one of the largest entities on the internet and specializes in online advertising. According to the WSJ, the Myspace acquisition helps transition Specific “into a media company with its own ad space to sell instead of simply an online ad technology firm that brokers ad space on behalf of other websites.”

From the press release announcing the acquisition:

“Myspace is a recognized leader that has pioneered the social media space. The company has transformed the ways in which audiences discover, consume and engage with content online,” said Tim Vanderhook, Specific Media CEO. “There are many synergies between our companies as we are both focused on enhancing digital media experiences by fueling connections with relevance and interest. We look forward to combining our platforms to drive the next generation of digital innovation.”

Both Activision CEO Bobby Kotick and Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, two Myspace cofounders, were rumored to be interested in acquiring the company in recent days.

Parts of this post originally published at LAist.
Previous posts about Myspace:

• Show Me the $$$ – 3/28/2006
• Pew: 50 Million Create Own Web Content – 5/30/2006
• The Facebook Lesson – 9/7/2006
• Universal Threatens to Sue YouTube, MySpace – 9/15/2006
• Is MySpace the Teenage Parking Lot of Today? – 1/11/2007
• Facebook Profiles Go Public – 9/5/2007
• Socializing the Music Industry: Online Tools – 9/10/2008
• Privacy Concerns and Social Networks – 5/18/2010

Last.fm, iLike, Networked Blogs, Causes and any of the hundreds of third-party apps you may have incorporated into your Facebook Profile page are no longer there. As I wrote about last month, Facebook’s customizable profile experiment was short-lived even if its demise took over a year.

Before this weekend, if you added approved third-party applications to your Facebook profile, many would have the option of adding to your wall or as a profile tab. The default selection would be to your Boxes tab. Today, even the Boxes tab is missing the apps that you used / played with / were annoyed by over the past couple years. From NY times Quiz, to How big of a Cubs fan are you?, To Myflickr, finetune, and everything else under the sun: Gone. Granted, the Boxes tab on my profile used to run on and on and pretty certain that nobody ever checked it out (myself included). Now the Boxes tab shows nothing more than I’m allowed to display on my profile tabs: the Facebook proprietary applications “Video” “Photos” and tabs for “Links” I share, “Notes” I write or import from this blog via RSS, Events, and Questions. The Boxes column is much narrower and ads have returned.

It’s been fun taking advantage of Facebook’s more open experiments over the past couple years but now our Facebook profiles have returned to their original states as rather vanilla bulletin boards.

That said, if I do want to customize my online profile and incorporate apps and even add raw html… there’s always Myspace!

MySpace served itself well by publishing the note MySpace Empowers Users With New, Simpler Privacy Setting in outlining the company’s ethos and it’s mission to enable both discovery and self-expression for users since its inception in 2003.

But MySpace’s memo falls short on definition and lacks any sort of road map (beyond “in the coming weeks…”) to give users the “we’re in this together” feeling that Facebook so often overlooks. And it’s more than 3 weeks after the Facebook open graph-api-privacy hubbub broke out. Facebook privacy concerns made headlines again on May 5 when a glitch that provided access to some users’ private information was uncovered (and allegedly patched within hours).

This tactic isn’t the result of a Friday “why not?” post on TechCrunch, it is just the kind of reactionary stage-stealing that any startup needs to capitalize on to rise to the top and evolve proactively. The fact that Facebook has broken out so far ahead of the pack over the past year makes it surprising that such reactions aren’t scripted months in advance. Twitter manages to evolve more subtly as it remains a relatively small and nimble, privately held company.

It’s been a long two years since Facebook leapfrogged MySpace in terms of unique visitors and never looked back. MySpace still boasts about 50 million monthly uniques — down from 100 million in 2008 — compared with 130 million for Facebook according to compete.com (March 2010). Exactly why MySpace should be capitalizing on any negative attention (whether deserved or not) that Facebook draws as often as possible. I’m specifically referring to the latest string of changes in the evolution of Facebook’s privacy settings, the opening of its social graph, and the way in which these changes have been poorly communicated to users. The first reaction to any change in policy or terms of service from Facebook has been one of general dismay followed by threats of ditching the service, and inevitably acceptance.

Facebook claims to have 400 million active users spending 500 billion hours per month on the service. Similar and competing companies such as MySpace should not hesitate to distinguish themselves from any criticism Facebook attracts (however warranted it may be). But the reality may be that MySpace and every other social network out there remains timid about privacy standards and user expectations and awareness.

The internet is still very much the wild west. And hackers will always be one step ahead of the law and security systems meant to stop them. As Bruce Schneier says, “You can’t defend. You can’t prevent. The only thing you can do is detect and respond.” It’s very cut-and-dry: post personal information to a free service such as Facebook or MySpace and assume that anyone would be able to find it. Though the internet often feels like a geek’s best friend, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not “all about you.”

What one publishes to the internet is out there – whether or not it works against them or to their advantage, or fades into the ether. But this is an opt-in society. It seems ludicrous and unnecessary to feature 50 privacy settings with 170 options as Facebook now does but it is important for users to seriously consider what they choose to share and with whom they choose to share specific types of content and data. It’s equally important for social networks to work with its core users, and to that end, we’ll see if Facebook takes a step back and refines the new settings.

But is MySpace referring to privacy settings or sharing options in offering a sort of one-click privacy function, with options including “public, friends only, or public to anyone 18 or over?”

Open systems have their pros and cons, but in the end — ideally — it all shakes out. The same can be expected of the OpenSocial platform, which MySpace endorses as a developer platform. New applications have been released in recent days such as SaveFace and ReclaimPrivacy that can restore user privacy settings in Facebook. It remains to be seen whether Facebook will act to ban such applications from the social network.

Facebook will inevitably face more negative publicity approaching the fall release of The Social Network, a major theatrical release which apparently portrays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a “ruthless and untrustworthy sex maniac.” Meanwhile MySpace is poised to make a splash with a new look rumored to debut later this year. If Jones and Co can parlay this privacy issue into some real momentum while Facebook leaves its users to figure everything out for themselves… you never know – but “simpler” isn’t always better.

Originally posted at LAist.

Chicago Tribune goes hyperlocal with TribLocal — will be watching thic closely.

And After chewing for quite a while, Yahoo! finally wrapped upcoming.org users into their Yahoo! ID and migrates the event listings site to upcoming.yahoo.com

55% of online teens use social networks and have created online profiles. Girls moreso than boys (70% of girls aged 15-17), according to the results of a Pew Internet & American Life Project poll released this week (summary | full report [.pdf]).

As today’s high school students grow up in an age where everything that pops is born and manifests online, the results of the study indicate a teenage culture where friends are made and maintained via MySpace (85%), Facebook (7%) and the like. But increased caution is being practiced (if it’s not forced by parents or the generally tasteless spam friend requests from MySpace) — nearly 60% of the 12-17-year-olds surveyed restrict the visibility of their profiles to friends only.

Also of note, no big discrepancies between teenaged social network users based on race or differences in household income. But only 17% admit to having ever used these sites for “flirting,” however that’s defined.

photo by dogseat via flickr.

Universal Media Group Exec Doug Morris: “We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars.”

Making the issue sound even more ridiculous, Morris proceeds to say Universal is just adapting from experience, saying: MTV “built a multibillion-dollar company on our (music) … for virtually nothing. We learned a hard lesson.”

This is a blatant misunderstanding of the law, as the infringers would be arguably those who download the music/video, not the sites that unknowingly host it (and would be quick to remove it, at least in the case of YouTube, if an argument was filed).

Does Morris blame FM radio for coming along and broadcasting cuts from records other than or in addition to the singles he pays them to play? I do wonder.

LINK

Guy Taylor writes of an intense interest in pop culture and reality TV in the face of bombing in Lebanon. He alludes specifically to Star Academy, the Lebanon Broadcasting Corp.’s reality show/contest now in its 3rd season and Super Star, a show allegedly based on the British show Pop Idol.

I heard a song on some NPR program yesterday, can’t seem to dig it up via search, but it was a Palestinian song with words altered in support of Hezbollah / Nasrallah and I can?t get it out of my head. According to Al Jazeera, the number one hit song of the summer on the streets of Ramallah has been “The eagle of Lebanon,” a tribute to Nasrallah. Good chance it can be heard on any of these Gaza/West Bank-based online radio stations.

Juliette Terzieff provides an in-depth update on the latest in Iraqi reality TV. Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the U.S. on transplanting notions of Western democracy on the Iraqi public, ?it has been the localized versions of “American Idol” and “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” that captured the hearts and minds of Iraqis.” Programs including “Construction Contract,” “Fame or Fortune” and “Congratulations!” are aired regularly on Al Sharqiya TV (watch live), a privately owned satellite-based channel.

My question is, when is Murdoch going to announce an initiative to penetrate the markets with his monster MySpace social network?

Here’s 15 minutes of “Star Academy.” More video clips can be found at Yahoo! Video.

Thanks to John Brown for passing along info on these two articles.