Celebrate good times, come on! Google just decentralized the whole music industry, and Lala is going to be the big winner. We heard rumblings of a Google-search-based music service last week, but now it's official, and boy, does it make walled gardens look silly. Other services (like MySpace's iLike) will get the nod too, but Lala will be the biggest beneficiary of the service, which will allow full-song samples to play from doing a search for either a song or (this is pretty cool) a lyric. Watch out, Apple and Amazon. source
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.
News Corp.’s Jonathan Miller • On losing the momentum that made MySpace one of the Internet’s hottest stars for about a year, until they screwed that up and nobody cared anymore. How does the social media company plan to get it back? By differentiating itself in the marketplace. They have some pretty good music offerings down the pipe, and they want to open up their infrastructure to developers (who aren’t 13-year-old girls that know how to put sparkles on their page). But – much like every Internet-related articlewe post that mentions News Corp. – Miller suggests they’re gonna charge for certain parts of MySpace. That’s OK man – we’ll just use Facebook instead. That’s where all our friends are. Just continue to follow the News Corp. party line. • source
I have close friends – and I know how to reach them. People create arguments, actual arguments or disagreements as a result of Facebook. I am like, ‘Really? It’s a computer network?’ We need to stop.
28-year-old Natasha Hawkins • Describing why she doesn’t use services like Facebook and Twitter – because it creates drama. Her friends are annoyed with her because it’s harder to keep her in the loop, but she’s steadfast about her beliefs. And she’s not alone. 85 percent of people between 18 and 34 used Facebook, MySpace and Twitter in August, but that means 15 percent didn’t. They may be living under rocks. They may be stubborn. Or they may just prefer human interaction. • source
Biz Stone says your tweets are yours. Yesterday, the Twitter CEO updated the site’s blog and told users that while Twitter can distribute as it would like, “they are your tweets and they belong to you.” As Facebook has faced lots of criticism from users about privacy issues (and MySpace has a rep as a place for sex predators), social networking often runs into issues with the rights of its users. So, that’s what this poll is about. Have an opinion? Vote. source
The fact that digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight should send warning signals to all of us. It should scare the hell out of us.
Internet smart person Danah Boyd • On the uncomfortable truth that people are going to Facebook instead of MySpace, and those still on MySpace are the equivalent of city-dwellers during the white flight era. Is some sort of racism going on? Are people under the assumption that people on MySpace are lower-class cretins? We argue that it’s because MySpace isn’t a place for friends anymore. • source
