Eons - Myspace for the elderly

Eons.com is a social network that is very comparable to Myspace. While the two sites are similar, I wouldn’t say they are competition for one another. While Myspace targets the youth of our world, Eons targets the elderly. 61% of the members are between the ages of 49 and 59 years old.

Eons is a company inspiring a generation of boomers and elders to live the biggest life possible. Set goals, celebrate life, get things done, learn, connect with other people 50+.

All great features, but those don’t compare to the “death alerts” feature. That’s right, when one of your buddies dies, you will receive a friendly notification so you can send your condolences on their “wall” or “comments.”

Neat.

YouTube Bigger Than Myspace

Most people felt that Myspace would eventually fall off of the top of the “social networking” world. The thing is, those people felt that the fall would take some time. Well, those people are wrong:

The video sharing site has taken a 3.9% share of global internet visits a day compared with 3.35% for MySpace, according to internet analysis company Alexa.

Source

As shocking as those results are, it makes some sense. Video will always beat text (see Television versus the Newspaper). Even though Myspace offers users complete freedom and a gigantic network of people, youtube simply brings entertainment value. There is no site on the Internet quite like Youtube when it comes to “content.” Untill another site provides the public with ridiculous video critics, dancing babes, and street fights, Youtube should remain on top.

Myspace Deleting Profiles: (FIXED)

If you were brave enough to browse around Myspace, you would have seen a ton of Myspace accounts that have been “deleted.” It must have been an error, since one of our Myspace’s was “Deleted.” Thankfully it seems like our account is back and fully functional. Those of you who were panicking, don’t worry; your friends and your account are still there! (at least we hope so!) This is just another hiccup Myspace has endured over the past week or so. Tom and his friends need to get a little more stable if they want to be the biggest website out there.

This is what millions of people saw:

Myspace Power Outage

Myspace experienced some downtime on Sunday and the effects are still hurting the Myspace experience.

“According to Netcraft Ltd., a British company that monitors Web site performance, MySpace was completely offline for about 90 minutes Sunday. The rest of the time, profiles were inaccessible as MySpace had a temporary page with the Pac-Man game and an outage announcement, which Netcraft said came from another data center in Tempe, Ariz.

One would think that the biggest social network in the world would be a little more stable. Rich Miller agrees:

“It’s unusual to see an outage like this where the systems that were in place clearly didn’t work as intended,” Netcraft analyst Rich Miller said. “I’m sure they will be looking very closely at what happened to try to prevent it from happening again.”

Either way Myspace will not suffer from the outages. The users on Myspace have become so used to slow performance, random downtime, and ugly design that no error on Myspace’s part could hurt their user base. The only way Myspace loses it’s grip on the social networking of kids if a FAR superior product comes out in the near future. So far, nothing of the sort has been released.

MySpace said it was exploring ways to prevent a recurrence.”

Source

MySpace adding restrictions to protect members

Starting next week, MySpace, the online social community giant, will begin adding restrictions to the service to protect minors.

• Users under the age of 18 will not get certain advertisements, such as dating sites.
• MySpace profiles will be able to be marked as “private”, and will only be available to friends.
• Site restrictions will be added for members 18 and over which contact member that are under the age of 16. Older users seeking to become friends with underaged members, will have to enter the recipients’ first and last names or their e-mail addresses.

However, 17 and 18 year old members will still be able to message members which are 16-years old and under, without any restrictions.

“A lot of 14- and 15-year-olds are friends in school with 16- and 17-year-olds,” said Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer of News Corporation’s Internet unit. “We want to balance the openness of our community with the interest of protecting the member.”

Source: NYTimes

MySpace expanding into Europe this summer

The Financial Times reports that MySpace plans on expanding into 11 European countries this summer, and possibly into China and India in the future. France and Germany will be amongst those countries who will first see the international MySpace sites launched

The company will on Tuesday announce that David Fischer has been appointed as managing director for the UK and Europe. Mr Fischer, 40, was founder and chief executive of Xlantic Group, a music marketing company, and has worked at Pressplay and AOL Europe.

Mr Fischer, who will be responsible for negotiating with television and music content owners to develop local versions of MySpace, said the first foreign-language sites would be ready later this summer.

MySpace, which was bought last year by News Corp for $580 million, is currently the largest social networking website, with more than 86 million users.

Girl sues MySpace for $30 million

A 14-year old girl is suing MySpace for 30 million dollars, claiming that MySpace has “absolutely no meaningful protections or security measures to protect underage users.” The lawsuit came after the girl was sexually assaulted by another user of MySpace.com.

The girl claims that a 19-year-old man lied in his profile about being a senior on a football team to gain her trust and phone number.

In a statement, MySpace said it is committed to the safety of its members.

“We take aggressive measures to protect our members,” said Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer. “Ultimately, Internet safety is a shared responsibility. We encourage everyone on the Internet to engage in smart Web practices and have open family dialogue about how to apply offline lessons in the online world.”

Alright.. It sucks that shit like this happens, but when are the parents going to start taking some responsibility about what their kids do? Why is a 14 year old allowed to go meet people off the net, unsupervised?

Can MySpace be more secure? Possibly. Will that stop things like this from happening? Probably not.

Source

Spammers looking to purchase large MySpace profiles

Need some extra cash? Sell your MySpace profile to spammers. Waxy linked to a blog of a MySpace user, which received a message in his inbox from a company looking to purchase MySpace profiles, of users who have at least 20,000 friends.

From: Jessica
Date: Jun 14, 2006 7:55 PM
Subject: TOP CASH FOR YOUR MYSPACE ACCOUNT
Body: If you have over 20,000 myspace friends in your account and would like to sell it, please contact me
I’m offering top dollar for these accounts. So, if you or someone you know wants to sell, then I’m looking to buy. ;-)

SingleStat.Us Shutdown by MySpace

SingleStat.us, a website which tracked people ther you were interested in on MySpace, and then notified you when they became single, has been shutdown. MySpace sent a cease and desist letter to SingleStat.us just 10 days after the site had launched.

David Weekly, the owner of the site writes:

I’ve closed this site, but it was a lot of fun to make (in a few hours) and run! It lived a short but fun life, with nearly a hundred thousand hits in its ten days here on Earth.

But I come not to praise SingleStat.us, but to bury it. But if you want to find out about other services I launch, gimme your email address. I won’t spam you.

This is the second site shutdown which we have reported on today.