Posted 11/12/09 at 01:23:46 AM by Nathan Grayson

Facebook games like Farmville and Mafia Wars carry a rep for being diabolically addictive, but who knew they were just downright diabolical? Apparently, the productivity-whacking timewasters were birthed in a hive of scam and villainy. Straight from the horse’s mouth:

“I knew that I wanted to control my destiny, so I knew I needed revenues, right, f***ing, now. Like I needed revenues now. I funded the company myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away," said Zynga CEO Mark Pincus. "I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this zwinky toolbar which was like, I don’t know, I downloaded it once and couldn't get rid of it.”

Fortunately, Pincus recently vowed to turn his games into sleaze-free zones, which will involve removing offers that ask for players’ addresses, phone numbers, and things of the like. 

“We have worked hard to police and remove bad offers. Nevertheless, we need to be more aggressive and have revised our service level agreements with these providers requiring them to filter and police offers prior to posting on their networks. We have also removed all mobile ads until we see any that offer clear user value,” Pincus said.

As a result, other Facebook/MySpace gaming companies -- like Offerpal -- have begun cleaning up their acts as well. This is especially surprising for Offerpal, who – before a recent CEO switcheroo – was vehemently denying its involvement in any backdoor dealings.

Honestly though, people, if you willingly gave your address and phone number away to a game called “Mafia Wars,” you only got what was coming to you. Just sayin'.

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Posted 10/26/09 at 04:10:31 PM by Bart Salisbury

Hard times come quickly for social networking sites. One minute you’re on top, popping open bottles of vintage sparkling mineral water and picking up the tab for another round of tofu burgers. The next you are head-in-hands wonder how it all went so horribly wrong. Today’s patient on the couch is MySpace, with parent company News Corp. none to pleased with what’s going on.

Jonathan Miller, who keeps the watcher’s eye on News Corp.’s Internet services, put it pretty plainly: "The thing you see in this space more than anything else is that if you don't keep innovating and moving forward, you get in trouble. You can't stop. And MySpace stopped." MySpace’s stopped and, since being number one in 2006, has been outpaced by more popular alternatives: Facebook and Twitter.

Time, again, to reinvent the wheel, according to Miller, and return to what MySpace does best: music and gaming. MySpace recently purchased the online music provider iLike. And it has announced a new music video service which will allow labels and artists to see how well their music is doing on MySpace.

To expand gaming opportunities, Miller believes MySpace must open up its system to external developers. He also hinted that some paid premium services to be in the offing.

"Everybody in the company is upset that we didn't keep going when we had the real momentum. Regaining momentum is always much harder than keeping momentum going,” Miller stated. That, and keeping an eye on your rearview mirror to see who’s about to overtake you.

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Posted 10/19/09 at 05:06:36 PM by Jason Barry

The most obvious and common reason to avoid any SSD solution presently is certainly price. Compared to rotational-magnetic state drives, solid states offer far better performance for most server environments, but prices were keeping them out of the server closet.

However, as datacenters continue to find the need to grow (due to the software-as-a-service movement, cloud server environments, etc) they are finding that the overall power consumption and thermal capabilities of SSDs may be worth the cost.

MySpace recently revamped their server outfit with SSD technology and managed to cut hardware costs by 60 percent simply by using SSDs. It was undoubtedly an expensive move, but what they spent in hardware they’ll make up for in infrastructure savings. The SSD units they used will save them 50 percent on power, and 80 percent in cooling.

Those are hard numbers to argue with. Check out the white paper at the fusionIO site (PDF).

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Posted 09/21/09 at 06:20:00 PM by Jason Barry

...S-Y-N-C-I-N-G.   MySpace was struck by Twitter’s cupid arrow and will offer status syncing.  Your MySpace and Twitter accounts can be connected together (using OAuth) allowing you to synchronize your MySpace status updates to your Twitter account. 

Further, you can also setup the connection to work both ways and synchronize tweets into your MySpace activity stream.  The synchronized tweets are advertised as “from MySpace” and offer a link back to your MySpace profile. 

MySpace is jumping on the bandwagon after AIM began offering similar functionality through its Lifestream service earlier this month.  The canoodling is likely an attempt, by all parties involved, to steal market share from social networking giant Facebook.

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Posted 09/01/09 at 05:04:14 PM by Andy Salisbury

Thanks to the inherent irresponsibility that comes with singing up for any social network, the IRS has been tracking down tax evaders thanks to people’s Facebook, MySpace and Twitter habits.

Mining through posted information such as relocation announcements, professional profiles and financial gains, agents with the IRS have been able to collect all sorts of bucks from would-be tax dodgers. One Nebraska agent was able to collect $2,000 from a disc jockey after he advertised on MySpace that he’d be working at a big public party. “These new supplements are often far more efficient than the older ones, such as reading the local newspaper or making inquiries at barbershops and church meetings,” said Jim Eads, director of the Federation of Tax Administrators. Another agent was able to collect $30,000 of unpaid taxes after a Google search lead him directly to his target.

So, if you’re the type of person that likes to boast about income that hasn’t been reported on Twitter, think twice. The IRS could be, and probably is, watching.

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Posted 08/25/09 at 06:05:46 PM by Paul Lilly

If you're concerned about privacy, it might not be enough to hide your profile or limit who can view your personal information, a new report suggests. That's because social networking sites are sharing your personal info with tracking sites, according to the report.

"When you sign up with a social networking site, you are assigned a unique identifier," says Craig Wills, professor of computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). "We found that when social networking sites pass information to tracking sites about your activities, they often include this unique identifier. So now a tracking site not only has a profile of your web browsing activities, it can link that profile to the personal information you post on the social networking site."

The study specifically points out Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter -- three of the most popular social networking sites on the planet -- as being guilty of leaking information. Using your unique identifier, a tracking site could then learn all kinds of things about you, including your name, address, email addy, gender, date of birth, what school you attend, where you work, and tons more.

But is it much ado about nothing? Only the tracking sites know for sure, and Wills admits that researchers have no idea what these sites do with the info, if anything at all.

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Posted 08/05/09 at 04:51:07 PM by Andy Salisbury

Effective immediately, the U.S. Marines have banned Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and all other social media sites from their networks.

According to an official order issued to the Marines, “These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries. The very nature of SNS [social network sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage that puts OPSEC [operational security], COMSEC [communications security], [and] personnel… at an elevated risk of compromise.”

The ban is currently slated to last a year, and was drawn up by U.S. Strategic Command due to network security concerns. But, if a Marine is able to provide a “mission critical need,” the sites could be temporarily unblocked. But, other than that, there will be no tweeting from the frontlines.

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Posted 07/24/09 at 12:48:43 PM by Paul Lilly

As more users flock to Facebook, MySpace owner News Corp sees a need to shake its social networking site up, and it plans to do that by transforming the social playground into a bigger online gaming platform. Johathan Miller, News Corp's head honcho, hopes the move will inspire videogame suppliers to use MySpace's data to develop better games and then launch those apps on the site.

"MySpace is and will be more in the future a gaming platform, a space for people to meet and play games," Miller said at the Fortune Brainstorm: TECH conference in Pasadena, California.

Whether or not the gamble on gaming works, MySpace is need of a change if it is to stay relevant. According to comScore, Facebook recorded 307 million unique visitors in April, compared to less than 125 million for MySpace. And further underscoring the divide between the two social networking sites, Facebook last month passed MySpace's peak number of unique monthly users in the U.S., 76.3 million, which was set back in October 2008, Reuters reports.

"If you look at the big activities online, games right now is number three," Miller added. "Communications, search, games. So it's clearly going to be a major focus."

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