MySpace – Page 2 – Digital-Lifestyles

Play Bestival: Learn Ukulele Via MySpace

Play Bestival: Learn Ukulele Via MySpace Our Sister site, Ventnor-Blog, has been scooping the world with announcements of who and what will be appearing at the amazing, manic extended weekend that is Bestival.

Besides the now-known amazing acts of The Beastie Boys, Chemical Brothers, a whole slew of talented ladies, Primal Scream, Jah Wobble and many others will be appearing.

The latest mold-breaking announcement of today is that willing punters, will themselves be able to play on stage at this coming Bestival, if they’re willing to pick up a ukulele and learn to play it.

That’s all very lovely, but what’s the relevance for Digital-Lifestyles? Well, the innovative way that enthused Uke holders will get up to speed on the required songs is via MySpace.

Play Bestival: Learn Ukulele Via MySpace

The whole jolly lot is being organised by the venerable Dulwich Ukulele Club (background) through the Night of 100 Ukes’s.

On there, in the lead up to Bestival, will appear details of the songs, the lyrics that need to be learnt and the cords that need to be sweated over in pursuit of Ukulele-nirvana.

The majority of preparation through practice will be done in the privacy of Uke-ers homes, but besides the planned rehearsal at “a central London pub” in August, Who knows, they might even choose to use Skype to Live to have remote practices.

We’re going to keep an eye on this one, both in our personal pursuit of Uke-ism and to watch how this MySpace-driven mass learning works out.

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MySpace Mobile Vodafone Deal: Further Details And Opinion

You may have seen the announcement of the tie up between Vodafone Europe and MySpace Mobile we ran a short while ago.

We think this is a pretty big story, so we’ve been chatting to Vodafone and Myspace to get further details and thought we’d fill you in.

The UK will be the first market in Europe that Vodafone will release it in. The dates of the release are being very closely guarded. We tickled and cajouled in an attempt to get it tied down further, which resulted in us finding out it will be the second half of the year. Perhaps later, rather than sooner.

There will be a subscription fee, as is the case in the MySpace Mobile deal with Cingular in the US. The details of costs are currently unannounced.

MySpace Mobile runs on its own application, not through standard Web access. We’re not aware that this has been seen in the wild, so the completion of it may account for the yet-undisclosed release date for the Vodafone service.

Access to the app will be via the yet unannounced ‘selected handsets’ and it will be available for download from Vodafone Live!

Impact
While it might initially appear to be a great deal for Vodafone to capture the youth as customers, there may be clouds on the horizon. In a recent visit to a youth club, it was surprisng to see all of the collected 13-16 year olds using BeBo, with not one on MySpace. When asked why, they replied that they just found setting up and running BeBo a lot easier than MySpace. We can only assume that Vodafone did some decent research on who actually uses it, rather than what MySpace told them … didn’t they?

It’s not clear how much of a market there will be for this. As mobile phones handle Web browsing increasingly better, the need for a dedicated application drops away, as people simply use their Browser on any network. It’s been seen that a well-written dedicated mobile apps can still maintain an advantage – like Google’s mobile email client – due to the restricted interface intrinsic with mobile keyboards.

What will the features be?
The details of what MySpace-ers will be able to do …

MySpace Mobile Features:

* Upload and View Photos
MySpace Mobile allows Vodafone customers to select photos stored on their mobile device and upload them to their MySpace profile. They can also view photos already uploaded on any MySpace profile.

* Respond to Mail
Vodafone customers don’t have to wait to log on to a computer to read and reply to their MySpace messages. From their mobiles, they have the ability to send messages to their MySpace friends, read and reply to messages sent to them.

* Manage Your Community of Friends

MySpace Mobile allows customers view and manage friend requests. They can also perform basic friend searches giving users the opportunity to “click-to-add “friends into their network. They simply locate a MySpace profile they wish to add as a friend, and then select to add this user as a friend.

* Post Comments or Blog Entries
Update your blog live throughout the day by posting new entries on the move, or make comments to other users’ blogs or MySpace profile pages. To post a blog or comment, people simply view the appropriate section and click “Post” to create the entry. Users can save their work at any time, and any information entered will update both the mobile service and the online MySpace profile page.

* View Friends
Customers have the ability to view the friend list of any MySpace profile. The friend list contains a text listing of the friends, which when selected would show the profile picture along with a link to that user’s MySpace page, and the ability to add the friend to your MySpace contact list for quick bookmarking.

Vodafone Europe Gets MySpace Mobile

Vodafone Europe has signed an exclusive deal with MySpace to get MySpace Mobile on their service.

Although currently exclusive, MySpace are remaining elusive as to the length of the agreement. When we asked, they declined to be drawn on how long the exclusivity with Vodafone would last, preferring to tantalise with “our ambition is to get MySpace on as many platforms as possible.”

MySpace addicts will be able to feed their cravings when not glued to the computers.

To tantalise potential subscribers further, Vodafone will pre-load it on to ‘selected handsets.’

MySpace did a similar deal in the US with Cingular back in December 2006. In that deal Cingular charged their subscribers an extra $2.99/month, plus data charges for the privilege.

At the time of going to press it is unclear if there will be a similar charging scheme with Vodafone.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

More details shortly.

MySpace Face Four Child Lawsuits

MySpace is being hit with compensation claims by the families of four children who allege sexual assault by adult MySpace members after finding out personal information about them on their MySpace pages.

The families from New York, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas have filed seperate cases in Los Angeles. They’re being represented by Arnold & Itkin LLP of Houston, Texas and Barry & Loewy LLP of Austin, Texas.

They allege “negligence, recklessness, fraud and negligent misrepresentation” by News Corp. and MySpace.

These cases don’t appear to fall into the ‘oh this might have happened’ category. Three of the cases have lead to the incarceration of the attackers, one whom is serving ten years in Texas. In the other case the two men have been arrested and are awaiting criminal prosecution.

Not the first claim
This isn’t a first for Barry & Loewy LLP. Back in June 2006 they filed the first lawsuit of its kind against MySpace, for a 14 year old girl who was also allegedly assaulted after contact through MySpace.

They claimed MySpace was “negligent in protecting teenage users despite numerous warnings of the dangers” and “had full knowledge that sexual predators were contacting young children on the website but did nothing to stop it.” The financial claim was $30 million in damages.

Concerns like these aren’t new to MySpace. Back in Feb 2006, parents were voicing their concerns.

MySpace have taken action. In December last year MySpace took action to kick off known sexual predators.

Be careful
Cases like these will bring into focus the potential dangers to those who reveal details about themselves online, although with a few simple rules, horrible incidents such as these should be avoidable. Most of them being the same rules you would apply in normal, non-online life.

DiddyTV: YouTube Gains A Paying Partner

In true online video blog style, the announcement was made by Mr Diddy (not one of Ken Dodd’s little friends), but differing from the norm, he’s filmed walking in to a Burger King and happens to drop their catch phrase a couple of times while order his burger to “have it his way”.

Interestingly Mr Diddy says that he’s going to “Buy a channel on YouTube,” so we’re assuming that there’s money involved, especially as Mr Diddy refers to “The Contract” in his video piece.

Also of note, is that Mr Diddy has his own URL on YouTube – YouTube.com/diddyTV – certainly the first that we’ve seen that uses such a short form.

There’s also a great spoof of Mr Diddy’s video by Lisa Nova.

Details of the deal between Mr Diddy and Burger King haven’t been disclosed, but we’d imagine that it’s going to be worth more that a couple of orders at their stores, even if his entourage are ordering large.

Of course, this big step up by Mr Diddy has absolutely nothing to do with the new album that he’s releasing this month and is cunningly blip-cut into his video pieces.

We attribute much of Mr Diddy’s knowledge and acceptance of YouTube down to Ryan Leslie, who is part of Mr Diddy’s posse (which we believe is the common parlance). Ryan has been using MySpace and YouTube for a long time to promote himself, his label Next Selection (for life) and his artists like Cassie. We’ve spoken about his work in many consultancy sessions that we’ve done with media companies – and frankly have great regard for the way he’s used the medium, such as his idea to get people to post their own lip-sync video on YouTube.

The absolute proof of this is Mr Diddy’s message to Ryan saying that he’d “finally talked him into it,” asking him to send over some of his friends to Mr Diddy’s Myspace. To show how these things roll, you’ll note that Mr Diddy doesn’t have Ryan in his Top 16 friends on his MySpace. You may also note that Mr Diddy has had over 10m plays of his tracks – some 4m of which for Come To Me, that was produced by Ryan Leslie. Where’s the friendship?

Google interested in buying YouTube?
Over the weekend there has been much chatter about YouTube being bought by Google, after it was rumoured by the WSJ. The figure banded around was $1.6Bn.

This would be the most expensive purchase that Google has made. Up until now they’ve been very smart and picked up other compaies at early stages for relative small change. The rumored figure for Blogger was $30m.

Google Video hasn’t been the boon that they had hoped it was going to be. Buying YouTube will take Google into the forefront of serving video online and with the $10Bn they’ve got in the bank, not an unfeasible amount for them to pay for it. When put into historical context, it appears a pretty cheap price – don’t forget that Yahoo paid $7.5Bn for broadcast.com back in the Web 1.0 days.