Facebook Bolsters Music Offering

Facebook today unveiled a new music section designed to let artist create profiles that showcase their music, videos, photos and other details. Participating artists can post songs for fans to stream, provide a full discography of previous works and sell tickets or merchandise. (Billboard)

Facebook suffers from social networking slowdown

Facebook has suffered its first monthly drop in UK users for 17 months, falling by five per cent to 8.4 million unique users between December 2007 and January 2008. Despite this, the social networking phenomenon has grown by 712 per cent in the UK over the past 12 months according to the latest stats from web intelligence group Nielsen Online. In contrast MySpace has seen a nine per cent fall in the number of unique visitors year on year with around five million users. (Silicon.com)

Google and Facebook join data-sharing alliance

Google and Facebook have signed up to an alliance, DataPortability, which aims to unify identity and data management across various social-networking platforms. "As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between, our chosen tools or vendors," reads the founding "philosophy" on DataPortability's website. "We need a DHCP [a protocol used in IP networking] for identity. A distributed file system for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together." (ZDNet)

Facebook to launch three new major features

Facebook is rumoured to be preparing three new major features for launch in coming months, involving a privacy filter for friend lists, group message broadcast functions and localised international settings. The message broadcast service will remove the current cap on the size of group message broadcasts, allowing mass messaging to be used. The function was originally excluded from the site over privacy and intrusion fears, in that it would be abused as a marketing tool to push mass information. (Cnet Blogs)

Ali Partovi, iLike: “Syndication holds real promise for the music business”

If you’re on Facebook, chances are you’ve added the iLike application: with 11 million users to date, it is by far the much-hyped social network’s favourite music tool. Yet as CEO and MidemNet 2008 speaker Ali Partovi points out, iLike won’t stop there. Its new Universal Artist Dashboard aspires to become a one-stop shop for online artist promotion, enabling them to upload data (tour dates, new songs, whatever) to all social networks at once. Partovi explains all, here… (Midemnet's Blog)