MySpace

After the 2006 suicide of 13-year-old Megan Meier, the victim of an Internet hoax, Missouri is taking cyberbullying very seriously.

Elizabeth Thrasher now has the dubious honor of being the first person charged with the felony of cyberbullying under a new Missouri state law.

According to a story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Tuesday, Thrasher is accused of posting a photo of a teenage girl, along with personal information about her, in the "Casual Encounters" section of Craigslist.

Prosecutors in the case said that the 40-year-old Thrasher posted the girl's picture, e-mail address, and cell phone … Read more

Music service iLike is dependent on Facebook for 80 percent of its traffic and revenue, and that fact has suppressed iLike's value, say sources close to the music service.

MySpace has offered about $20 million to acquire iLike, a music recommendation site and provider of Facebook's most popular music application, sources with ties to iLike said. They added that the deal could close at any time. TechCrunch first reported the acquisition talks.

Some in Silicon Valley have speculated that MySpace isn't willing to pay more for iLike because it fears Facebook will boot iLike once its main … Read more

News Corp.-owned MySpace is "close to acquiring" social music service iLike, according to TechCrunch.

The price tag is rumored to be in the neighborhood of $20 million. Representatives from iLike were not immediately available for comment.

The report comes within days of iLike launching a music download store--a development first reported by CNET News--with MP3s available from all four major record labels.

The deal, if confirmed as accurate, highlights the often complicated connections in digital media's elite ranks.

iLike, for example, rose to fame through its close ties to Facebook. The iLike application, since re-branded to simply Music, … Read more

Dell has partnered with Nickelodeon and Whyville.net to give life to its latest version of the Mini10v. According to Dell, the kids' Netbook has been designed with safe computing, education, and entertainment in mind. At a glance, Dell is only trying to reach another market (children), but if you look a little closer, the Netbook may represent a change in the way the next generation of preteens and children will learn to socialize and develop their decision-making skills.

The Netbook comes with desktop animations which link to Whyville.net, a virtual world where kids of all ages chat, shop, and visit places in town that engage them in science, nutrition, art, and business activities.

One of the most interesting locations is the cafeteria, where Whyvillians can pick a food item, view its nutritional facts, and select a meal based on an educated decision. If their character eats more fattening, high-calorie items, the cartoon character will see the effects as it becomes fatter and unhealthy. Likewise, if the character doesn't eat enough, he will become frail and sickly. A lack of vitamin C will cause scurvy sores, and a lack of calcium will cause weak bones and a bandaged head. As a result, the child may be advised that his Whyvillian should see the Whyville nutritionist.… Read more

Three years ago this month, the Financial Times and The New York Times chronicled the emergence of an untried but promising new digital-music service: SpiralFrog.

The start-up would offer music free of charge to consumers and attempt to hand the bill to advertisers. Since then, we've seen a dozen companies make names for themselves by offering their own twist on the ad-supported music model, including MySpace Music, Imeem, and Pandora. But regardless of how anyone has tweaked it, not a single service in the still-nascent sector has proven that it knows how to offer consumers a compelling free-music service … Read more

MySpace unveiled its new messaging system late on Thursday night--which now lets members use the formerly internal service to e-mail others from an @myspace.com account--and the reactions have been pretty positive. Since it's slowing rolling out in beta over the next few weeks, hands-on reviews are hard to come by, but the design looks pretty good and people seem to agree that it may help reverse some of the site's well-publicized traffic stagnation.

Here are the numbers: MySpace says that nearly a fifth of its traffic is related to the messaging platform, and it has 130 million … Read more

PASADENA, Calif.--News Corp. digital chief Jonathan Miller said Thursday that MySpace needs a culture shift that focuses on spotting changes in consumer behavior and adapting more quickly.

"One of the things about this medium is you have to continually develop product," Miller said, speaking at the Brainstorm: Tech conference here. "You can't just put something on the shelf."

For MySpace, that means focusing on doing a few things well. Asked about Rupert Murdoch's recent comments that MySpace should focus on entertainment, Miller said: "When you get involved in companies that need to … Read more

PASADENA, Calif.-Of all the losses suffered by the music industry, one of the biggest may be the fact that nearly all of the investors that once were building digital music services have moved on.

"There are not a lot of entrepreneurs involved in this space," said David Pakman, a music industry veteran and now venture capitalist at Venrock Associates.

By Pakman's count, there have been 109 venture-backed digital music start-ups. Fewer than five, though, produced a substantial return, he said.

"Investors lost a lot of money in this space," he said, speaking on a … Read more

So, according to PaidContent, MySpace is about to upgrade its messaging service to full-out Web mail: so that instead of only being able to communicate with other MySpace members, users will have an @myspace.com e-mail address. This will start rolling out on Thursday, apparently, with the new service available to all MySpace members by the end of the year.

This seems a little odd at first, considering we recently heard that the troubled MySpace was more or less giving up on trying to compete with Facebook, and was attempting to rebrand as an "entertainment portal." Launching a … Read more