Music Ally

According to a post from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook now has 400 million users, having doubled its size the last year.

To celebrate, the company has unveiled its latest redesign – expect the usual user complaints throughout the next few days.

New features include new dashboards for applications and games, which Facebook says will “surface the applications you’ve interacted with most recently as well as your most recent application activity and your friends’ activity”.

Which could be significant for companies and artists’ own Facebook apps…

“We have no plans to launch a music service on Facebook”. That’s the unequivocal quote from the social network’s spokesperson yesterday, following new speculation about its music plans.

They stemmed from a new application called Music appearing in users’ Applications screens on Facebook, which linked through to the URL Facebook.com/music (the same format as the service’s official photos and events sections).

Facebook says this was a technical bug – but NOT a technical bug showing a secret new official Facebook music service. It’s not a super-convincing explanation, so watch this space…

We knew that ISPs weren’t too keen on the clause in the UK government’s Digital Economy bill that allows ministers to change UK copyright law without primary legislation. But now four of the biggest web companies have joined the battle.

Google, Yahoo, Facebook and eBay have written to business secretary Lord Mandelson expressing “grave concerns” at the bill. “The industry as a whole had hoped that the outcome of Digital Britain would be a clear, workable set of principles by which the industry could operate,” says the letter.

“On the contrary, Clause 17 creates uncertainty for consumers and businesses and puts at risk the UK’s leading position in a digital Europe… This clause is so wide that it could put at risk legitimate consumer use of current technology as well as future developments”.

Received wisdom has it that now Facebook has overtaken MySpace, the latter is doomed to a Friendster-style slide into irrelevance. However, with a new CEO and executive team in place, MySpace is aiming to make a comeback in 2010.

A group of social media experts have been giving CNET their views on what MySpace needs to do, including sorting its design out, opening up more of its APIs, and adopting a more counter-cultural role.

However, music is seen as one of its main strengths: Digital Outlook MD Jens Bachem says it should “aim to own music for today’s connected generation. The real fight is with the likes of MTV and iTunes, not Facebook, Twitter or any other social network.”

In lion-lays-down-with-lamb news (we’ll let you decide which is which), MySpace and Facebook have confirmed they’re in talks to share music and video content between the sites.

“Facebook is focussing on building the best technology which helps people share content, while at MySpace they are focussing on more a content-led strategy,” Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg tells the Telegraph. “We would like to have their content, as we already do with many other sites, shared across our network because it is good for our users.”

Both Sandberg and MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta have confirmed the negotiations, which would likely involve people signing into MySpace using Facebook Connect, to share music and videos they like back on Facebook.

There were excitable reports overnight that Google is about to launch its own music service. That is seemingly not the case. However, what Google IS doing is preparing to unveil richer music features within its main search engine.

Essentially, when users search for band names, they’ll bring up a “One Box” including a photo, biographical info and an option to stream preview clips and/or full streams from partners including Lala and iLike. There will also be prominent Buy MP3 buttons.

All four major labels are thought to be supporting the initiative. TechCrunch has screenshots, while Hypebot has an invite to a launch event next Wednesday. But Google isn’t the only Web 2.0 giant making waves in music this week.

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We’re picking up increasing chatter about a possible new partnership between Spotify and social network Facebook. Details are thin on the ground, but it appears to revolve initially around easier ways to share playlist data with Facebook friends, but that this could evolve into an app to actually play the songs too. Something could even be announced this month.

It’s not a huge surprise – Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek trailed just such an app in his keynote at The Great Escape earlier this year, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg sparked rumours in August with a status update reading simply “Spotify is so good”, and both companies now share an investor – telecoms tycoon Li Ka-Shing.

And talking of new platforms for Spotify… During its presentation at a Scottish Society of Computers and the Law event in Edinburgh last week, Spotify’s Niklas Ivarsson showed one slide with the three key distribution strategies for Spotify: Desktop, Consumer Electronics and Mobile.

We know all about Desktop and Mobile, but Consumer Electronics? The slide mentioned games consoles, media extenders and TVs. The latter appears to be part of its just-announced deal with TeliaSonera in Sweden, but Spotify hasn’t announced anything on the console side so far. However, the Consumer Electronics section of the slide was illustrated by a shot of a PS3…

Earlier this year, P2P client LimeWire got a new feature that allowed people to share files with their Facebook friends. Well, it’s been slapped down by the social network, after initially asking LimeWire to make some changes to the way it worked.

“Unfortunately, this week we were contacted again… this time not with a change request, but with a notice that they are going to disable the feature,” blogs LimeWire’s Jason Herskowitz. “Rather than leave you with a broken LimeWire, we decided to disable the feature before they did so.”

It’s not the first time Facebook has acted not-so-friendly with file-sharers – earlier this year, it squashed a similar feature on The Pirate Bay.

We’re paraphrasing heavily there, in a doubtless irresponsible media manner. Scottish academic Dr Tracy Alloway has revealed research into the effect on your “working memory” of using social media.

Apparently, Facebook is good for it, improving your ability to temporarily store and manipulate information in your short-term memory. Twitter is not so good though: its endless stream of information that doesn’t need to be processed reduces your attention span.

Which reminds us… Oh no, sorry, it’s gone. What were we talking about again?

Apple is facing more brickbats for its iPhone apps approvals process, this time from Facebook. Well, Facebook engineer Joe Hewitt, writing on his personal blog. He’s the man responsible for Facebook’s iPhone app, version 3.0 of which is currently in the approvals process.

“The review process needs to be eliminated completely,” he writes. “Does this sound scary to you, imagining a world in which any developer can just publish an app to your little touch screen computer without Apple’s saintly reviewers scrubbing it of all evil first? Well it shouldn’t, because there is this thing called the World Wide Web which already works that way…”

Apple has argued – most recently in a filing to the Federal Communications Commission – that its review process is necessary to catch bugs before apps go live on the App Store. However, that’s not a position Hewitt has any sympathy with.

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