Ringo, their first social site, was an unabashed copy of Friendster. The husband-and-wife team sold that off to Monster, the job-listings site, for a pittance — but a pittance that provided the seed funding for Bebo, which Xochi openly says was inspired by MySpace. Copy early, copy often, sell out. (Photo by Auren Hoffman)

But another problem for MySpace has been its ad sales team, which a different agency exec complained to me last month is still full of pre-News Corp. amateurs. MySpace ad sales team in New York needs "a connected, pro leader" whom the agencies know and trust, this source said. "There is nothing so valuable as a professional sales force" — one like Yahoo's. Vakili is the third Yahoo exec to join MySpace in recent weeks.

Besides Peerflix, the company started by jilted MySpacer Brad Greenspan has also purchased struggling companies PageFlakes and Revver in the last year, and Greenspan made a personal investment in Flurl, but was turned away by JumpTV.

All that wheeling and dealing while not paying attention to basic operations like payroll? Flashy products and technology that may or may not actually exist? "Out of touch" sounds about right.

Greenspan and friends will probably just blame the market as management shorts employees, since that's all the rage these days. But this looks a lot like a textbook case of "excess and lack of self-discipline" to me. Who may end up the winner in all this? The Hollywood Hills Cat Burglar, who seems to have gotten away from Greenspan's mess just in time. (Photo by Getty/Alberto E. Rodriguez)

After a challenge to a similar state law in Utah last week, a federal judge restored a sex offender's right to anonymous speech online. Though the judge stated that this decision should not apply unilaterally to all registered sex offenders, her ruling is the first to question the conventional wisdom: that curbing online speech can curb sex crimes.

Free speech advocates and social network analysts have long been claiming that this approach won't work. First, there's the problem of the expansive definition of "sex crime" — from violent assault to public nudity. On that basis, Flickr has at least one employee who, after bending over bare-assed for his colleagues, could be banned from the Internet. Add to that that state and Federal lawmakers still can't seem to grasp the qualitative difference between a sixteen year old flashing her boycrush and a fifty year old posing as the same sixteen year old. Toss with a little bit of election-year mania about being tough on crime, and you get a botched bill that may only drive sex offenders further from the public eye — the opposite of the safer, happier Internet McCain hoped to create.

(Photo by soggydan)

On MySpace's Data Availability, a feature which lets MySpace users link their profiles to other services like Twitter, versus Google's similar Friend Connect, he wrote:

MySpace is taking a much more interesting approach than Google.

In an early post about MySpace Music, Arrington gushed:

Music almost certainly plays a part of MySpace’s continued dominance of Facebook.

About MySpace friend-in-chief Tom Anderson's hacking back in the 1980s, Arrington dutifully wrote:

Frankly, my opinion of Tom Anderson just rose significantly.

A week before MySpace Music launched, Arrington quit playing games and just posted free ads for the service. None of that approached the review Arrington gave MySpace Music the morning it launched.

MySpace has done something incredible at a big picture level: they’ve created both a compelling music experience for users as well as a realistic, long term business model for labels and artists in a world where recorded music moves towards free. Depth of catalog and usability is far beyond what other free streaming services like Last.fm and iMeem currently offer. And when it comes to listening to music, the pop out player, pictured above, is excellent. It’s a great resource for users, and it’s likely to become the center of the revenue ecosystem for artists, particularly unsigned artists starting to make a name for themselves. Indie labels are in a great position, too. A lot of positive press is rolling in around this launch, and it’s much deserved.

Of course, it's highly-compressed digital audio, and therefore pretty crappy. But I have to admit, the offerings go well beyond the pop selected for the Jonas Brothers' playlist — while I'm sure the cashiers at Amoeba Records might still sneer at the selection's depth, my searches for everything from Os Mutantes to Gas Huffer, Blind Willie McTell to Mongo Santamaria came up with multiple tracks to choose from. Eventually. The site is currently running incredibly slow, which may be a good sign of interest or a critical fumble of the launch. Users frustrated in the process of creating playlists might just go back to Last.fm, Imeem, iTunes or any of a number of other places to preview and purchase tracks.

• Ads are banners, not text — either 728×90 or 300×250.
• The ads must link to another MySpace page, rather than offsite.
• Minimum campaign buy: $25
• The ad system seems tied to the pending launch of MySpace Music, a venture with the Big Four record labels.

Van Natta is well qualified, and the job involves partnerships and business development, two areas where he's especially skilled. And he's long said he wants a CEO job at a consumer Internet company, but I'm skeptical he'll take the gig. He strikes me as too independent to answer to meddling MySpacers and hidebound music-industry executives. He also likes to be involved in the product, and it sounds like MySpace Music is mostly developed already. Schuon seems a more likely candidate. His main qualification: He previously ran Pressplay, an online music-industry joint venture. That's also the main strike against him, since Pressplay was a huge flop.

Imeem CEO Dalton Caldwell, whose company already offers a similar product,

RIM will now offer customized access to the popular social-networking site, including instant, push-based messaging to BlackBerry and MySpace users, real-time status and mood updates, camera integration, and optimized photo management. Also as part of this collaboration between the two companies, RIM has created a BlackBerry community page on MySpace for users to access BlackBerry smartphone, content, videos, games, ringtones, skins and other features.

MySpace for BlackBerry is expected to be available globally in October.

• Though MySpace has worked hard to improve its overall site design, its been plagued by spam-happy advertisers and banner-ad schemesters from its very beginning. Because of that and the site's junky-looking past (and we think present), MySpace remains a "tarnished" brand. Brand managers don't want to soil their own through association.
• Ad buyers tend to buy ads from people they know. MySpace's ad sales force has had a lot of turnover and its been hard to form relationships with them, says our guy.
• Though our guy doesn't use it, the people in his agency who do tell him MySpace's vaunted ad-targeting technology called "Hypertargeting" doesn't work. Sure, its good enough at telling an ad buyer who are the users who would visit the page on which the ad would appear, but it doesn't help to make sure the ad fits within the page's context. "Are [users] seeing the ad? Or are they trained to ignore it?" Also, our guy has some branding advice for MySpace. Get rid of the "hyper" in "hypertargeting." Like as if it were called Xtreme Targeting, the "hyper" makes it sound like News Corp is trying to dress up the technology as more than it is. Which, of course, it probably is.

A dandy of a deal for Microsoft? Perhaps not. Look closer at ComScore's chart and you'll see that the fastest-growing search engine is MySpace, which gets all of its search ads from Google. Google doesn't make much money from them, though, CEO Eric Schmidt admitted earlier this summer. Probably because no one searches MySpace for something to buy. Will Facebook prove any different?

... finally our digital efforts at Fox Interactive media are paying off with continued success of MySpace and the other FIM portfolio businesses.

If MySpace were actually successful in Murdoch's eyes, don't you think he'd have found some suitable piece of hyperbole? Inspect the letter for yourself:

• Wendi Deng Murdoch, MySpace China
• Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, MySpace
• Max Levchin, Slide
• Robin Li, Baidu
• Markos Moulitsas, DailyKos
• Elon Musk, SpaceX
• Ali and Hadi Partovi, iLike
• Mika Salmi, MTV
• Dmitry Shapiro, Veoh
• Quincy Smith, CBS
• Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times
• Peter Thiel, Clarium Capital
• Evan Williams, Twitter
• Andrew Zolli, PopTech

Why? Greenfield says the site's redesign, which put a huge ad space at the top of the site's home page, allows MySpace to "reach far beyond the 'social media' advertising category and to target far larger portal advertising budgets." Wired reports that MySpace also now charges advertisers extra for Friday ads on the homepage, because that's when film companies want to push new movies.

Facebook, which has a much cleaner, more user-friendly interface, doesn't allow similar site takeovers and in fact removed homepage banners as part of its redesign. The difference between the sites is simple: MySpace is trying to make a buck, right here, right now — and Facebook wants to find an innovative new advertising product so it can be bigger than Google.

It shows that, yes, kids today are using posts and pokes to flirt, but they're also using social networking sites to share sex ed with each other. What's not to like about a new generation of honest, well-informed sluts? And with 93 percent using social-network communities regularly, at least they're faithful to the sites that bring them together.

The phrase Vesting in Peace, which means you work for stable company increasing in value, and you’re doing as little as possible until your stock options are worth something — just enough to be perceived as functional, but never to the point of exertion.

Klein gets this mostly right, though he fails to note where it most frequently happens: At startups after they're acquired. Most of the original YouTubers, for example, are only at Google because they're still vesting in peace.

(Photo by sfllaw)

In related news:

Meghan Asha is more sophisticated than Mary Rambin.

Gossip Girl is more sophisticated than The Hills.

Night Train is more sophisticated than Thunderbird.

Peanut butter is more sophisticated than jelly time.

DeWolfe and his MySpace cohort, Tom Anderson, renewed their contracts last fall with News Corp. last year for $15 million apiece, spread over two years. Paying that amount has, FIM executives believe, left nothing for them. "They're pissed," says our tipster.

Then again, do these puffed-up Fox executives deserve much more than they're getting? Pop quiz: Name a Fox Interactive property other than MySpace.

A+ to Facebook for brand recognition? But it wasn't the profiles or messages that took down Nanney — it was after one 17-year-old woman who did meet with Nanney called the cops, fearing for her safety. As much as law enforcement relies on the open surveillance they can engage in online, it's still the girls themselves who best know when to sic the cops on a creep.