LetsBuyIt Blog

According to Bloomberg MySpace wants to enter the sphere of online retail now after having already strung a nice deal with Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group Corp. for selling music online in order to compensate for the dwindling numbers of members and decreasing advertising revenue! They are even considering their own online check-out system. Either this is a desperate try to turn the destiny around or a brilliant move. Let’s see what the Murdoch’s are coming up with.

We had previously reported about the Opensocial Initiative and that MySpace would like to open up an API for outside developers to develop applications for MySpace, similar to the applications of Facebook. Well, they are online now and some applications are already available. MySpace also provides the opportunity to create social shopping widgets! Check out the MySpace application center here.

A while ago we wrote an article about the API project called OpenSocial, which can be eventually plugged into many portals and systems. When Google, MySpace and consorts launch an initiative such as OpenSocial, then it means serious business.

What happens when the giant Microsoft opens up their ports for outside developers? You should read this article “Microsoft to Share More Technical Secrets” published by NYTimes. This inevitably implies some sort of revolution!

We have previously written about API and it’s one of the keywords of development in the last few months. When popular API are provided for the third-party innovators, there is a huge demand, as we can see with GoogleMaps and the over 4000 applications on Facebook itself.

With the growing availability of API it became more difficult to understand them all and that is why Google decided to simplify the development for websites and developers by creating one development platform called: OpenSocial.

This is how Google explains it on their website: “The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the APIs and host 3rd party social applications. Because it is based on the famous standard of HTML and Javascript it is easy to be learnt and quick to be applied. “

The following websites implementing the OpenSocial Standard are some websites which imply to revolutionize the development industry inevitably:

MySpace, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, und XING to name just a few of all participants.

If Facebook does not join this initiative we are bound to see an interesting competition.

Nearly a quarter of upstream clicks to the top 19 social sites originated from one place on the Web, according to a report from Hitwise.

Social networking sites are feeding off each other’s good will, according to a new report by competitive intelligence service company Hitwise.

Facebook’s traffic has doubled in just over 18 months, but MySpace still receives most of the Web’s social networking traffic. MySpace captured 79.7% of social networking traffic in April, according to figures released by Hitwise on Monday. Facebook accounted for 11.47% of social networking visits, while MySpace alterative Bebo drew 1.28% of the traffic last month, according to the Hitwise report.

MySpace visits rose 70% from April 2006 to April 2007, while the percentage increase for the lesser-used sites was much more dramatic, according to Hitwise. Facebook visits increased 126% from April 2006 and Bebo’s traffic rose 184% from last year, Hitwise announced.

I have been to the Film Festival in Cannes last week: sun, great movies and stars!

I’ve been really amazed by the increasing links there are between those kind of happenings and the web usages.

Appart from of course the real-time information and images broadcasting of the event itself - you can also see extracts from selected movies - two main trends are to be highlited:

• MySpace sponsored one of the beach in partnsership with Smiley: a very nice space with a stage, where artists, actors, producers could meet and some events like movie projection or music concerts were displayed. The atmosphere and events were also relayed on the web.
• I have met a lot of producers and directors who had planned physical meetings in Cannes through networks like aSmallWorld and.. really met and had instersting and very professional meetings!

The 60th Cannes Film Festival has really been a proof that social networking is really becoming an efficient business media, at least in certain industries..