Once-Mighty Myspace Acquired for Measly $35 Million

myspace acquired by specific mediaAfter months in search of a buyer, Myspace has finally been acquired. In an email to employees late Wednesday morning, CEO Mike Jones broke the news to employees in an email late Wednesday morning, according to TechCrunch.

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.

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Namesake.com Invites You to Talk About Your Passions

namesake.com invites

With Twitter becoming more and more of an echo chamber and LinkedIn lacking in conversation what it offers as a networking tool, it can be difficult to find a place on the web to provoke frank conversation, receive honest feedback, and develop professional relationships for co-creation.

Namesake, a Los Angeles-based startup, is hoping to fill that void. Founded in January 2010 by entrepreneurs Brian Norgard and Dan Gould as a place for professionals and creators to match ideas with opportunities and resources, Namesake.com is still in private beta (to get in now http://nmsk.co/gRsIvp).

Based in a small office in the Hollywood Hills, Namesake is the third startup for Norgard and Gould, who previously cofounded NewRoo, a content aggregator acquired by News Corp in 2006, and Twitter advertising tool Ad.ly.

As a Namesake user, you can build a profile with a full bio and embedded video, or choose to keep it simple. Users can follow conversations passively, participate, and initiate their own. Conversation activity on the site streams in real time on the main page.

Questions and topics recently active in conversations on the site range from the Peter Thiel-inspired “What is it about the world that you know is true that everyone else doesn’t understand?” to “…here’s my washed, dried Beef round top round steak, what shall I do with it?” and “Anyone got tips for staying active in social media… while still being productive & getting tons of stuff done?”

Namesake also features live chats, one afternoon for example, author and USC Marshall faculty member Dave Logan is leading a conversation on tribal leadership. A live chat earlier that day featured LA-based serial angel investor and BetterWorks founder Paige Craig.

Try Namesake out for yourself — get in while it’s still in beta by visiting http://nmsk.co/gRsIvp.

Originally posted May 26, 2011 at LAist.

Gone: Application Tabs on Your Facebook Profile

Facebook application profile tabs gone

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!

Twitter Knows Me Well, Suggests ‘Who to Follow’

twitter suggested followers who to follow personalizedIt’s mid-2010 and the social web is finally getting comfortable with the opening and exploitation of the “social graph.” It likely helped that Facebook took a bit of backlash over the past few months to pave the way for the rest. And now, like any good social network should, Twitter is beginning to show the cards that we (the users) dealt it.

Twitter’s “Who to Follow” personalized suggestions can now be seen in the right-hand sidebar of the Twitter.com user web app and under this tab. This is familiar territory to anyone who uses Facebook or even Amazon. Twitter knows who you follow and who follows you back as well as who many in your circle follow that you do not yet follow. Hence the social graph. It’s a wild and crazy algorithm, but if you think about it in physical terms, we all have friends that we want to introduce specifically to other friends. And it should be assumed that by using Twitter, you hope to communicate with and discover new peers, business partners, etc.

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