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Facebook may be the king of the Silicon Valley crowd, but Paris Hilton apparently prefers MySpace. 42 year old MySpace cofounder and CEO Chris DeWolfe has been dating 27 year old Paris Hilton for at least a few weeks, sources close to the company confirm. We first got wind of this when we saw DeWolfe in a random video clip with Hilton from last month (see below). He’s also been throwing parties in the Hamptons, and Hilton has been at all of them.

Now we’ve got a source in New York that’s confirming the two are dating. DeWolfe is hosting yet another party tonight in the Hamptons, and Hilton will reportedly be there as his date.

This is a brilliant marketing move for MySpace (or for Hilton?). Or maybe they actually like each other. All we’ve confirmed is that they are definitely dating.

As far as we can tell DeWolfe still has a wife (but is reportedly separated) and Hilton still has an official boyfriend, but whatever, this is Hollywood. Best of luck to both of them.

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The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) has tapped MySpace to create an online portal for the upcoming election season that will include live streaming video and real time polling. The site, called MyDebates.org will be open to anyone (you don’t need to create an account), and will launch as we get closer to the first debate on September 26.

The CPD is charged with organizing the four “real” debates leading up to this November’s election (it is unaffiliated with the dozens of primary debates we’ve seen over the last 18 months). The partnership with MySpace marks the first time the organization has included any kind of real-time participation.

Visitors to the site will be able to watch the debates stream in real time. A team of employees working behind the scenes will monitor the arguments made by each candidate, and will pose questions to viewers that will be displayed in tiny popup overlays. In this way, the site will be able to collect an endless amount of polling data in real time, allowing users to immediately see how the public responds to each question. The site will also be involved with the town-hall debate on October 7, which will feature questions drawn from a pool of submissions from MyDebates.org.

At MyDebates.org, users will be able to create widgetized “Issue Cards”, which can be embedded in their blogs and webpages. While there are a number of sites that offer similar widgets, this one has a trick up its sleeve - during the broadcast of each debate, these Issue Cards will fold open to reveal a miniature video player.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen tie-ins between debate organizers and online sites - last year we saw similar cooperation between CNN and YouTube, with disappointing results. But the primary debates pale in comparison to those leading up to the general election, and MySpace and the CPD seem to be taking a new approach.

Television changed the election process forever, bringing the candidates into the living room of every American. The web is clearly the next frontier, but it has yet to live up to its potential. If MySpace can create a site that is both intuitive and informative, it stands to actually enhance the democratic process by engaging and motivating the millions of apathetic Americans who might not vote otherwise.

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MySpace COO Amit Kapur apparently meant it when he told me earlier today that MySpace is continuing to hire despite letting 5% or so of staff go in the coming days. He introduced five new senior executives this evening via an email out to all staff, the text of which was forwarded to me and is copied below.

The new execs are Manu Thapar, SVP of Engineering (formerly Yahoo VP Engineering), Angela Courtin, SVP of Marketing, Tish Whitcraft, SVP of Customer Care, Jason Oberfest, VP of Business Development and Abe Thomas, VP of Online Marketing

All of the new execs seems to be eating the MySpace dog food by at least having a presence on MySpace. Except former Yahoo’er Thapar, that is. He’s MySpace-free for now. I wonder how long that will last.

Email is after the break:

Hey everybody,

MySpace has been on a hyper-growth track since our launch in January 2004. We’ve evolved into a stable, profitable business with amazing talent driving one of the most trafficked websites in history. Four years ago we started at a small office in Santa Monica with a few employees, and now we operate offices in 19 countries across the globe and support 29 localized communities across the web.

Today we’re pleased to announce several new senior team members joining MySpace:

· Manu Thapar, SVP of Engineering
· Angela Courtin, SVP of Marketing
· Tish Whitcraft, SVP of Customer Care
· Jason Oberfest, VP of Business Development
· Abe Thomas, VP of Online Marketing

Looking back, this has been an incredible year of innovation and expansion—in the last few months, we have successfully developed and launched a number of major company initiatives strengthening our leadership position in the future of the social web. All of you have played a big role in keeping MySpace in the driver’s seat of innovation.

Here are some of the initiatives we’ve rolled this year:

· MySpace Developer Platform
· Site Redesign
· Data Availability
· Formation of the MySpace Music Joint Venture
· MySpace Support for OpenID
· OpenSocial launch with Google, Yahoo and others
· Implementation of Google Gears for Mail Messaging and Sort

Looking ahead, there’s a lot more to come—this is going to be a big year!

Thanks!
Amit

Meet Our New Team Members:

Manu Thapar, SVP of Engineering

Manu Thapar serves as the SVP of Engineering for MySpace, the world’s premier social network. In this role Manu is responsible for overseeing the company’s infrastructure, security and high priority projects, as well creating an offshore development team for MySpace.

Prior to joining MySpace, Manu served as Vice President of Engineering for Yahoo!, Inc. where he was Responsible for software infrastructure engineering, operations, test, product and program management teams of more than 250 engineers. Manu also served as Sr. Director of Engineering for Cisco Systems where he oversaw all aspects of delivering large scale network products used by high end customers for the development of sophisticated enterprise web sites.

Manu earned his PhD from Stanford University’s esteemed school of engineering in 1992.

###

Angela Courtin, SVP Marketing (www.myspace.com/acourtin )

Angela Courtin serves as SVP of Marketing for MySpace, the world’s premiere social network. In this newly created role, Angela is responsible for leading the marketing, branding, promotions, events, content and entertainment teams for MySpace with the objective of increasing growth and public awareness and driving revenue through marketing programs for the company.

Prior to Joining MySpace Angela served as Vice President, Integrated Marketing, for MTV Networks, responsible for overseeing the West Coast department. In this role she served as the liaison with production and series development as well as the West Coast client base.

An accomplished, creative, and vision-oriented marketing executive, Angela has developed key relationships with clients and production to create rich product integrations, branded entertainment and game-changing marketing executions. Her background in development and production have been key in understanding the creative dynamic in achieving authentic integration experiences for the audience, the client and the narrative.

Angela also served as Associate Producer on HBO’s Big Love and also worked for Knollwood Productions in Development. Her MTV trajectory would intersect in 2004 when she served as Vice President of Rock the Vote, where she partnered with MTV’s Choose or Lose campaign and corporate America to bring civic participation and voter empowerment to young people across the country. Her work in politics spans the beltway, from the Human Rights Campaign to the Democratic National Committee.

Her work was recognized in 2004 in Out Magazine’s OUT 100, the annual list of the year’s most interesting, influential, and newsworthy LGBT people. Angela earned a B.S in Civil Engineering and an MBA from Oklahoma State University.

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Tish Whitcraft, SVP of Customer Care (www.myspace.com/tishwhitcraft)

Tish Whitcraft recently joined MySpace as SVP of Customer Care responsible for delivering a world-class user experience to the 250 million + MySpace users. In her new role, she will be responsible for building scalable global customer support, user experience and satisfaction and driving the user feedback loop back to the business. In addition, Tish will focus on building and implementing a new online self-help strategy which will allow MySpace users to get answers and help by delivering more accurate and relevant information right when users need it and want it.

Most recently, Tish served as Vice President of Global Customer Experience and Operations at ooma, a consumer voip start-up, where she had overall P&L responsibilities including day-to-day business operations, business development, marketing and sales and product development. The primary focus was to ensure the highest quality customer experience from product to post-sales. Prior to joining ooma, Tish served as the leader and operational executive responsible for Global Customer Operations and Customer Experience at online giant Yahoo! Inc., leading customer care and experience for Yahoo!’s 850 million users in 48 markets across 68 different product categories.

With extensive experience in the communications and outsourcing sectors, prior to ooma and Yahoo!, Tish has held executive management positions with inServ e-Customer Solutions, Aegis Communications, Lexi International, and Communique Telecommunications. At Aegis, Tish served as COO and Senior Vice President of Operations, overseeing the P&L for this $250M outsourcing firm, servicing communication, technology, software and financial service industries with clients such as ATT, Macromedia, SBC, Nextel, Directv and the Dish Network, IBM, Toshiba and American Express.

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Jason Oberfest, VP of Business Development (www.myspace.com/joberfest)

Jason Oberfest serves as Vice President of Business Development for MySpace, the world’s premier social network. In this role, Jason is responsible for structuring and negotiating deals to drive revenue and support the launch of innovative new products. Alongside the company’s business development team, Jason oversees the commercial aspects of the MySpace Developer Platform and MySpace’s Data Availability APIs.

Prior to MySpace Jason served as Managing Director of Business Development and Product Management for Los Angeles Times Interactive. In this role Jason launched a redesign of latimes.com and structured deals with leading startups including Netvibes, Aggregate Knowledge, Eventful and Mixx.com.

From 1999-2005 Jason served as Vice President of Strategic Planning at Blast Radius, an interactive agency. In this role Jason founded the strategic planning division of the company and led the design and development of media and commerce websites for Sony, Nintendo, Viacom, Warner Music Group, A&E Television Networks and others. Jason worked with AOL from 2002-2005 developing AOL Shopping, AOL Search, AOL.com, and other products. Blast Radius was acquired by the WPP Group in 2007.

###

Abe Thomas, VP of Online Marketing (www.myspace.com/abethomas08)

Abe Thomas serves as Vice President of Online Marketing for MySpace, the world’s premier social network. In this role Abe is responsible for developing the overall strategy for acquiring new customers through online advertising, affiliates and search marketing. Working closely with the company’s creative group, database engineers and product marketing teams Abe spearheads companywide initiatives geared towards driving loyalty from existing customers through email, direct mail and on the website, using effective segmentation and promotional strategies and tactics.

In 2006, Abe spent a year in Mumbai, India leading eBay India’s Internet Marketing team. With Google still in its infancy in India, successful optimization of eBay’s Search program resulted in a high representation of eBay pages in Google’s Paid Search program and Google’s Natural Search results.

In Jan 2007, Abe moved to PayPal Merchant Services where he was focused on marketing PayPal to our largest merchants.

Prior to joining eBay, Abe held multiple business development, product marketing and consulting positions at AltaVista, Palm, IBM Consulting and Motorola.

Abe received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, a MSEE from USC and then an MBA from the University of Chicago. He lives in San Jose with his wife and two girls aged 3 and 6. He loves playing Basketball, Cricket, cooking and spending time with his kids.

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The as-yet unlaunched MySpace Music will likely partner with Amazon to handle all music ecommerce transactions, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Apple and Rhapsody are also bidding for the business, however, and one source says a final decision hasn’t yet been made.

The project, which combines the music from three of the four major labels (Sony BMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group) with $120 million in cash from MySpace along with MySpace’s existing music properties, is set to launch in September.

Music download sales are just one revenue stream for the property. In addition to sales of DRM-free music (singles, albums, playlists), MySpace Music will likely also offer ring tones, concert tickets, merchandise (tshirts, etc.) and branded advertising campaigns.

But downloads are going to be a big part of total revenue, and while margins on music sales are low, the volume could be massive as MySpace directs its traffic to the new site. The big three music providers are likely the only partners who can handle that kind of flow. And Amazon and Rhapsody need market share to effectively compete with market leader Apple/iTunes.

Another factor in bidding is likely the ability of the partner to easily handle signed, independent and unsigned artists. MySpace has 5 million bands with a presence on the site, so the long tail is a factor.

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MySpace is rolling out a couple of announcements this morning a day ahead of Facebook’s F8 developer conference.

The first is confirmation of our story that they are supporting OpenID, although they aren’t releasing any details (It’s our belief that they will first issue OpenID IDs, and possibly become a relying party later).

The company is also announcing the launch of two new Data Availability integrations: Flixster and Eventful (we built what we believe is the first Data Availability app last month).

MySpace is also making a core policy change to Data Availability. Previously third party services were not allowed to store any MySpace user profile information at all - they simply requested it from MySpace, used it to create a web page and then dumped it. Now MySpace is allowing 24-hour caches of profile information, and permanent caches of certain “core elements” of a user profile.

Screen Shots:

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Well, here’s something that’s so ridiculous it couldn’t be made up. McDonald’s teamed up with MySpace to create a new jingle for the 40th anniversary of the Big Mac. The original song (two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce…) was created back in 1974. Over 1,000 user created songs and videos were submitted - the winner’s jingle becomes the official Big Mac song and will be featured in a McDonald’s Big Mac TV commercial.

Enter 29 year old Tamien Bain, who held up a McDonald’s at gunpoint when he was 14, was convicted as an adult and served 12 years in prison. He’s also one of the five finalists in the jingle competition (no. 4, the guy with the white tshirt and baseball cap).

The finalists were selected by a panel of judges. Apparently someone didn’t do a background check before making the final decisions. Or perhaps they did a background check and this is a publicity stunt. Either way, Bain has reportedly hired a PR person and is making the most of the contest.

I can’t wait to see the commercial, because he’s definitely going to win. Here’s his video submission:

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MySpace and Google demonstrated an interesting mashup of the MySpace Data Availability API, oAuth and the iGoogle gadget specification at the oAuth Summit a couple of weeks ago. The application, which pulls the core MySpace feature set into iGoogle, is not yet publicly available, although MySpace has said to expect in in August.

It’s another example of data portability in action (as well as the alliance between MySpace and Google to compete with Facebook). The example application MySpace has built for iGoogle is a gadget that allows MySpace users to check profile updates, their status messages and private messages - all from within the gadget. The gadget is built according to the new gadget spec, meaning that it should also work with other sites (such as Yahoo) that also support the gadget and oAuth.

These are the screen shots that were shown at the conference:

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MySpace was the first of the Big Three to announce tools for third party sites to integrate MySpace user data into their services (called, collectively, Data Availability). A day later Facebook announced Facebook Connect, then came Google Friend Connect three days after that.

Today MySpace is fully launching Data Availability (look for it this afternoon at developer.myspace.com), and any third party developer can now build applications using their APIs. Google’s product remains in a test phase with a handful of sites (example), and we won’t likely hear more from Facebook until their F8 conference in late July.

MySpace is taking a much more interesting approach than Google, which controls data sent to third party sites via an iframe. MySpace is actually streaming data to these sites, which allows for true integration between the services, not just a bolted-on social tool.

Developers can access any publicly available profile data from a MySpace user and integrate it into their site. This includes a user’s name, picture, bio, social graph (list of friends), and other information. Users authorize the data transfer via a one-time secure OAuth login to MySpace from the third party service. The service is then allowed to access the data.

Since actual data is being streamed out of MySpace, they have a strict terms of use policy that forbids third party sites from storing or caching the data, other than the unique MySpace user id of the user. Each time a page is rendered the third party must re-request the data from MySpace via a set of APIs. That means any changes by the user to their MySpace profile data or friends list will be instantly applied across third parties who access the data.

Like Google and Facebook, users will be able to revoke access by any third party via a privacy control panel on their MySpace account:

Actual Data Portability, But No Syncing

This is a real move towards data portability, since MySpace is actually allowing data out of its server vault. The fact that third parties can’t store that data isn’t a perfect solution, since MySpace retains ultimate control of it (I discuss this problem in my Centralized Me post). True data portability requires constant syncing of data so that the users remain in control. But until real standards emerge on just how to do that (and there are some big hurdles), MySpace’s approach seems more than reasonable. This is a real step forward in terms of user data rights, and I expect we’ll see a ton of very creative implementations of Data Availability.

We are building a test application now and should have it live within a few hours. Look for lots of implementations over the next few days.

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In April, Facebook caught up to MySpace in worldwide unique visitors (actually nudging past it with 116.4 million unique visitors versus 115.7 million for MySpace). Now the worldwide comScore numbers are out for May and Facebook continues to blow past MySpace with 123.9 million uniques (up 6 percent), versus 114.6 million for MySpace (down 1 percent). Facebook also boasted more pageviews worldwide (50.7 billion versus 45.4 billion). Maybe MySpace’s redesign which just went live this week will pick things up for them again.

In the U.S., though, which is the biggest advertising market, MySpace is still well ahead of Facebook, with 73.7 million unique visitors in May compared to 35.6 million for Facebook. And that number for MySpace is up 2 percent from April, whereas Facebook’s had 0 percent growth. So it remains to be seen if and how fast Facebook can catch up in the U.S.

As for the second-tier social networks, they have fewer than half as many visitors. Here is the breakdown for May:

Worldwide Unique Visitors To the Top Social Networks

Facebook—123.9 million
MySpace—114.6 million

Hi5—49.6 million
Friendster—38.1 million
Orkut—32.2 million
Bebo—25.1 million

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MySpace IM is popular - as many as twenty percent of users on the site at any time are also logged in to their IM client. But it’s only available via a download for Windows machines, locking out everyone else. There is no official MySpace support for webchat or non-Windows clients.

Pidgin, Trillian and eBuddy have announced support for MySpace IM via a reverse engineering of their proprietary text-based protocol. The version of Trillian that supports MySpace, however, is in private beta, and I have never been able to get eBuddy to work properly with MySpace IM.

So if you really, really want MySpace webchat, you can now use unofficialmyspaceim, a new flash based site build by Prasad Mahendra. I tested it, it works. I even had a somewhat unsatisfying chat with MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson.

Beware - you have to enter your MySpace credentials to use the service, and there’s no guarantee this service won’t use them for, well, anything they want.

Also, you may not have to wait too long for official Mac and webchat versions of MySpace IM. Rumor is they’re already working on it.

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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.

The screenshots above show some of the changes. The homepage will be significantly less cluttered, with the barrage of navigation links across the top whittled down to just five key links (home, mail, profile, music and myspaceTV). Other less used navigation functions will be available under a drop down menu. The 28 additional navigation links currently on the top half of the page will also be moved to the drop down menu.

Search is also being redone with a tabbed results page, reducing the need to search multiple times for different kinds of results. People search results are also being ranked, with friends first, then results for people you’ve worked or gone to school with, and then the remaining results. This makes a search for “Jeff,” for example, return meaningful results v. the mess you get today. MySpace’s new search technology is based on the open source Lucene project.

The other interesting area of the redesign is the Flash MySpaceTV player. MySpace says they will now offer 480p video when available. New features include a true full-screen mode and easier controls.

MySpace worked with San Francisco-based consulting firm Adaptive Path on design and information architecture elements of the project.

MySpace cites Comscore statistics in saying that 25% of all Americans visit the site monthly. It is the most trafficked website in the U.S., and 12% of all online minutes are spent on the site. 300,000 new users sign up daily.

MySpace has recently started to reap the benefits of focusing on the tech/developer crowd, a strategy that began last year. Big media, and blogs, are noticing the new and improved MySpace.

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