Buzzsonic.com

I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out what was causing the Windows Live Writer to crash everytime I tried to insert an image into a post. I back tracked a couple of days to see which recent Firefox plug-ins I’d added and it turns out it was the MySpace toolbar I mentioned here causing the problem.

So, out goes the toolbar and there ends the head scratching. Though at least one good thing came out of my search for solutions, discovering Flickr4Writer.

I have three MySpace profiles, one for my latest music project, one to network my travel site and one which acts as an archive for my old bands music. My latest music profile (the 99th Floor Elevators) is the most active and has proved great for networking and making new contacts in that field.

I actually hate manually visiting MySpace daily so a neat ’shortcut’ is to install the unofficial MySpace Firefox toolbar which is unobtrusive enough and enables you to quickly toggle between profile pages, messages and the like. The toolbar auto hides when the MySpace page is closed. One thing the toolbar is lacking is the ability to log-in to multiple accounts, that would make it even handier.

Related Links
Download Unofficial MySpace Toolbar (Mozilla.org)
MySpace Toolbar Home (Freewebs.com)

A lot of fuss yesterday caused by a sensationalist Guardian headline “YouTube Overtakes MySpace”. Writer Mark Sweney writes:

“YouTube has established itself at the top of the league of the new generation of community websites by becoming even more popular than MySpace, according to research.
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.”

What the article fails to tell readers is that the figures were taken from the small percentage of Internet Explorer users who have the Amazon owned Alexa toolbar installed on their browser, hardly an exhaustive user demographic. A fact only Mashable and GigaOm seemed to notice.

Related Reading

YouTube vs MySpace (GigaOm)
YouTube Now More Popular Than MySpace (Mashable)
Who’s Video Is It Anyway? (BusinessWeek)
YouTube Is World’s Fastest Growing Website (Mashable)
MySpace’s Trip to the Top (Slashdot)

Its been a good few months since Buzzsonic heard anything of note on the yet to be fully operational Snocap, the legal P2P download service founded by (original) Napster founder Shaun Fanning. Music blogs Hypebot and Coolfer were the first people this week to spot that a new Snocap technology was being used by new (to us) band the Format, selling tracks via their MySpace profile using the Snocap service Linx.

The Format tracks are available as MP3’s at 79c each and use Paypal as the merchant for payment, though Snocap Linx works with MP3 as well as content encrypted with WMA DRM according to the Snocap website. Bands can cut and paste the Linx code into their MySpace profiles (or any website for that matter) much like other online services like YouTube, Slide and Photobucket and are offering code to MySpace users to promote their own services.

Snocap’s Linx service is also designed to let online retailers sell music from the companies huge selection of songs. Snocap has distribution deals with Universal Music, Sony BMG, EMI Group and Warner Music, along with a number of independent labels.

David Berlind at ZDNet had an interesting point on the news on his blog this week.

“Actually, it’s the independents that will really benefit from MySpace as a sales channel (while the traditional labels go the iTunes, etc. route). While I don’t believe were at a tipping point yet, the idea of commerce-enabling MySpace for music sales could position indies for an interesting offensive against the entertainment establishment. And, with no DRM, it’s definitely a step in the right direction.”

Related Reading

Napster Founder Commerce Enables Unprotected MP3s on MySpace (ZD Net Blogs)
Snocap Looks Beyond P2P (MP3.com)
Napster Guru Fanning Breaks Snocap Silence (Buzzsonic.com) Dec 3 2005
Mashboxx and Snocap Get Busy (Buzzsonic.com) May 6 2005
EMI Records Join the Snocap Queue (Buzzsonic.com) Nov 20 2004
Napster Founder in Major Label P2P Talks (Buzzsonic.com) Nov 13 2004

Nothing new here I guess. Another frustrating time for anyone trying to access their MySpace page over the weekend with a series of outages for the ‘world’s busiest web property’.

The problems continued over the weekend into Monday morning where the site seemed to be completely down. I understand the problems of trying to scale to a user base so massive (between 45 and 80 million users depending on who you listen to) but still it all seems very shoddy when you consider the money floating around here. When was the last time Google or Yahoo was unusable?

Related Reading
MySpace Closed After Power Outage (BBC News)
MySpace Down Due to Power Outage (Digg)
Power Outage Knocks MySpace Offline (Netcraft.com)

As you would expect with something as ubiquitous as MySpace (much like with Google) and its huge user base there’s an ever increasing army of unofficial ‘hacks’ adding features to the insanely popular social networking website.

Mashable have covered “feeding the Myspace beast” well so far here…and here
“The list of sites that feed the MySpace beast is growing longer by the day: RockYou, Slide, Photobucket, NooZ, Abazab, Umundo, Kiko Events, Frappr, BuddyPing, Sitepal, Stickam, Bunchball, MyPickList and Nabbr are among the more interesting plays….”

Some other interesting recent additions include MyWhatSpace a PC desktop app that lets you separate your MySpace friends into groups and send messages to all the members of any group at once. Sounds like a promising idea in theory but I couldn’t get the small app to run and load past the whole page of Adsense ads that greets you on the login page. Web 2.0 news site TechCrunch were overly gushing in praise for the app this week nevertheless.

There’s a possibility that the service violates the MySpace terms of service. The company has already shut down two other services (DatingAnyone and SingleStat.us) operating alongside MySpace in recent months.

The other new service affiliating itself as a ‘MySpace add on’ this past week is Supcast, a free service that allows you to send a text, picture or voice message from your phone directly to your MySpace or blog. Supcast joins a growing list of similar services which include Umundo and Abazab.

Trakzor is another neat idea. Simply put, you add some code to your MySpace profile and Trakzor tracks your visitors. The downside is the app only works if other MySpace users have the Trakzor code added to their profile too. This looks like a service that perhaps MySpace should add for marketers as a premium add-on themselves ?

Elsewhere Frappr, the popular Google Maps mash-up have added a neat hack that adds your MySpace user name to Google Maps and gives you a map of all your friends which you can add to your profile. There’s another unofficial MySpace map service here which maps out users by zip code.

MySpace News Coverage
MySpace Hacked! (TMZ.com) 16 July 2006
MySpace Soars, Hitwise Defends Figures (TechWeb.com) July 14 2006
MySpace vs Yahoo! Mail, or Apples vs Oranges (Jeremy Zawodny) July 12 2206
MySpace Not What You Think ( I Speak Of Dreams) July 11 2006
MySpace the 27.4 Billion Pound Gorilla (TechCrunch.com) June 13 2006
The MySpace Economy (MicroPursuasion.com) June 8 2006
Dont Believe the MySpace Hype (CNNMoney.com) June 7 2006
Feeding the MySpace Beast (Mashable.com) April 19 2006
MySpace Business Lesson:Communication (Wisdump.com) April 18 2006
Scenes From the MySpace Backlash (Wired.com) Feb. 27 2006
Users Crowd Into MySpace (BusinessWeek.com) Nov. 15 2005
Why Murdoch Really Bought MySpace? (GigaOm.com) Aug.6 2005