The Other Web 2.0 War -- Social Network vs. eMail

Facebook No Longer The Second Largest Social Network

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

It was sort of inevitable given Facebook’s monster growth over the last few years, but April 2008 was the milestone: Facebook officially caught up to MySpace in terms of unique monthly worldwide visitors, according to data released by Comscore and shown above. Both services are attracting around 115 million people to their respective sites each month...

MySpace: Check Out Our Redesign! Facebook: Check Out Our Huge Developer Conference!

from Silicon Alley Insider by Peter Kafka

Dueling announcements from social networking's biggest players today: MySpace (NWS) announced that it was overhauling its design, while Facebook announced that it would be holding its second annual F8 developers' conference July 23rd.

It's possible that the timing of the two items are unrelated, but the news is very much intertwined, because the sites' fortunes are very much intertwined. MySpace's overhaul, for instance, comes on the heels of Facebook's overhaul: MySpace's do-over is designed in part to make it look more Facebook-y, while Facebook's facelift is designed to make it look less MySpace-y.

And Facebook's first F8 conference, held last spring, was the event that truly separated the network from the rest of the pack, by opening up its platform to outside developers -- a move that MySpace emulated earlier this year. Anyone want to venture guesses about what Facebook will announce this go-round? The comments section is all yours.

Redesign A First Step In Bringing Order To The MySpace Chaos

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

Los Angeles based social network MySpace, which has 115 million monthly visitors worldwide (Comscore, April 2008), will be launching a redesign of its site next week. The first phase of the project, internally called “MySpace 2.0,” will launch on Wednesday June 18.

The changes affect five major areas of the service: homepage, navigation, profile editor, search and the MySpaceTV Flash player...

Microsoft’s 320 million anti-Google weapons

from Scobleizer -- Tech geek blogger by Robert Scoble

Yesterday I was sitting in Brian Hall’s office when the Yahoo/Google news was breaking. Who’s he? The guy at Microsoft who runs most of the non-search Windows Live stuff. You know, Hotmail, Messenger, Spaces, and a bunch of other stuff.

We filmed a little fun cell phone video, but our longer interview will be up sometime over next few weeks.

In that he told me what Microsoft is going to do now that the Yahoo deal fell through. He admitted that he was one of the guys working on that deal.

His number one weapon to use against Google?

The 320 million active users of Hotmail and Messenger. That’s 320 million people who have signed into these services in the past 30 days (which, by the way, is WAY up from when I worked at Microsoft — when I worked at Microsoft they were saying 150 to 200 million). Keep in mind that Facebook looks like they just passed 100 million users, so you can see that these are still very popular services.

The trick is how do you get an email user turned into a user of a larger set of services...

Google Friend Connect Disabled By Facebook

from Publishing 2.0 by Scott Karp

Google is taking a big shot at Facebook in the PR war over data portability and social network interoperability. I signed in to Google Friend Connect, implemented on the Go2Web2.0 blog, and saw this:

Normally, you wouldn’t list a service that isn’t a partner, but in this case Google chose to list Facebook and let users know loud and clear that they can’t connect to their friends on Facebook because the feature has been DISABLED BY FACEBOOK.

Ed: Where is Yahoo with eMail, IM, 360, Del.icio.us, Flickr, MyBlogLog, Pipes, ... ???