Music Ally

Swedish firm Snowfish has gone live with its plans for a social network on which users will be rewarded with a 50% share of the advertising revenue generated by their blogs and uploaded music, videos and photos.

The company, staffed by a mixture of techies and music industry veterans, has been working on the site for 18 months. It’s due to launch this Spring, and they’re touting it as “the future of publishing”. They also claim users will be able to design and launch their personalised Snowfish sites in less than three minutes.

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A new survey from Synovate claims that 58% of adults worldwide don’t know what online social networking is, while of those who do, 36% are actually losing interest in it.

The survey quizzed more than 13,000 people in 17 developed nations, although it didn’t include anyone under the age of 18 – one of the keenest demographics for social networking. In the US, the proportion of users losing interest was even higher, at 45%.

With the music industry so excited about social networking, what’s your view? Are we leaping onto a bandwagon as users leap off? Or could music be one of the features that actually keeps people interested in MySpace, Facebook and their rivals?

Meebo is an innovative chat and instant messaging service that can be embedded onto websites and social network profiles. It’s already powering chatrooms for the likes of Avril Lavigne, The Killers and Weezer, (more…)

AOL has closed its acquisition of social network Bebo, and announced plans to combine it with its other community sites, as well as instant messaging divisions AIM and ICQ. Bebo boss Joanna Shields will head up the new division, which seems likely to spur a.) some kind of rebranding of those two IM platforms, and b.) no renewal of Bebo’s advertising deal with Yahoo when its contract ends in September next year. Meanwhile, AOL’s backing will see a fast expansion of Bebo to countries beyond its UK and US bases

New research from Nielsen Mobile claims that 1.7% of all UK mobile subscribers – about 812,000 people – visited a social networking website using their phone in the first quarter of 2008. However, when you consider just mobile internet subscribers (i.e. people with data plans), the percentages rise. For example, 9% (more…)