When the News Corporation added MySpace to its portfolio nearly three years ago, it expected that if its base of 16 million users kept growing — and each user kept adding friends, sharing photos and swapping flirty messages — the advertising dollars would roll in.

MySpace announced tonight that a new design will be launched next Wednesday. The army of MySpace haters is sure to kick into high gear, with exclamations that it's about time - even though they're unlikely to be satisfied with the changes. When Newscorp bought MySpace nearly three years ago for $580 million, people laughed at the acquisition. It's now recognized as a steal and yet people still complain. It's for user-experience reasons, though, that they should stop complaining.

Intervention

MySpace has won a legal battle, against spammers Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines, according to an AP report. The battle ended in a $234 million judgment by a Las Angles court, ruling against some of the most notable spammers, thanks to their antics on popular social networking site MySpace, and even some massive spamming campaigns throughout the 1990s.

The road to data portability and a universal social graph across social networks and web sites is paved with good intentions. But we are still very early in the evolution of such efforts (with some prior bad memories to erase - as this NY Times points out).

On the heels of yesterday’s “Data Availability” announcement from MySpace, Facebook has just announced the launch their own initiative to allow users to port their profile data to other web sites. Here’s what will be included in Facebook’s version according to a post on the company’s developer blog:

the future of art is working the grassroots, finding your audience through one to one friendship

music of starsix - visionary

myspace woes