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Former Myspace CEO Owen Van Natta now former Zynga executive
Owen Van Natta has resigned from his position as an Executive Vice President of Business Operations at casual/social gaming megalith Zynga, according to a regulatory filing released Thursday. While Natta maintains his position on the company's board of directors, his involvement in the developer's daily operations has ceased. Natta served as Facebook's Chief Revenue Officer until joining Myspace in 2009, where his tenure as CEO lasted until being scooped up by Zynga in August of 2010. Natta takes 2.1 million shares of Zynga stock with him, leaving behind 4.6 million of his original 6.8 million shares which had not fully vested to maturity. Despite delaying its IPO earlier this year, Zynga is still expected to go public before long, and depending on how that goes Natta's shares could either extend his resignation indefinitely, or amount to a whole lot of his last name.
NYPD creates social networking unit to pick perps, not poke them
You've heard of the Special Victims Unit, but what about the Social Networking Unit? The time has come for criminals dumb enough to boast about their exploits on Facebook and Twitter to pay the proverbial piper. According to NY Daily News, the Big Apple's newly minted Assistant Commissioner, Kevin O'Connor, will enlist the department's juvenile justice unit to hunt down ne'er-do-wells on various social networking sites. So remember, even if your friends don't care about the Cookie Puss you just posted to your Facebook page, somewhere out there someone is watching.
Robot band covers Marilyn Manson, renders sullen teenagers obsolete (video)
Sure, we've seen robot bands before. But even when insecure and egotistical, they never quite capture the youthful disaffection we want from our mechanical pop stars. Until now. End of Life is a robot band consisting of a cello, and electric guitar, drums, and, for some reason, a flat-bed scanner -- maybe he's the cute one? The group recently covered Marilyn Manson's three-string anthem "The Beautiful People," and it sounds almost exactly like you'd expect: we'll call it "raw, visceral, and uncensored." We can't wait to see them sneer at Rock Band-playing robots too lazy to learn a real instrument. Catch them in the video after the break, and you can tell all your less-cool friends you knew them back before they sold out.
Specific Media buys MySpace, already has one friend named Tom
To be honest, we weren't entirely surprised to hear rumors back in February that News Corp. was looking to hand off MySpace -- after all, most of the luster seems to have left the once-mighty social network, and Rupert Murdoch's time these days is pretty full running a media empire and saying things in an Australian accent. Word got out this week that the site has landed firmly in the hands of the broadly-named Specific Media, a digital ad network that apparently couldn't get together a cool $19.1 billion for the first-place Facebook. According to rumors, the company scored MySpace for the rock-bottom price of $35 million, a fraction of the $580 million its predecessor paid a half-dozen years ago. No word on whether Murdoch's electroclash band will continue to use the service to promote its gigs.
iOS 5 contacts app has fields for Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn and Myspace info
One of the more interesting iOS 5 features revealed this week during the Monday keynote was seamless integration with Twitter. Now a report published by All Things D shows that fields for other social networking sites also appear in the iOS 5 contacts app, including Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, and Myspace. While the operating system's integration with Twitter is fairly widespread -- single sign-on for multiple apps, ability to send photos directly from the Camera, YouTube, Safari, and Maps apps, and auto-fill from Contacts -- it appears that at this time the other social sites aren't as tightly bound to iOS 5. Users can begin by populating handles for each of the sites on an address book page for a contact, although developers speaking to All Things D reported that even that capability was a bit buggy at this time. As blogger Liz Gannes notes, "The inclusion of the feature shows Apple's acknowledgement of the importance of Web presences and contact information." At this point, manually entering friends' handles could be onerous for those who have hundreds or thousands of "friends" on each social networking site. Apple could offer Twitter-like authentication for the other services, which would make matching contacts and social network handles somewhat more automatic. With at least three or four months remaining before iOS 5 becomes available to users, we're sure to hear much more about social network integration in the new mobile OS.
The Daily Grind: Are social media connections in MMOs useless?
I first started to notice it in Champions Online. Cryptic gave us the ability to broadcast our achievements in the game over Twitter: "CapnCrunch has reached level 10!" At the time, it felt like a silly idea that wouldn't catch on, but for some reason, it has. More and more we're seeing studios working hard to integrate popular social networks into their MMOs, and more and more I'm wondering... why? RIFT has been big on doing this, implementing the ability not only to set your account to automatically tweet achievements ("Hey guys, I jumped off a bridge and didn't die!") but also to post them in Facebook. The game also allows you to record video and take screenshots to post online, which seems to me to be more useful but still probably not as captivating to a potential personal audience as one might hope. So my question today concerns these social media connections in MMOs -- are they useless? Are they just a fad that few people use? Do the ones who do use them end up annoying their followers with a stream of spam messages? Or do people actually enjoy the ability to have their games tie in with their social networks and see how their friends are progressing? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Talking Sony and identity protection with LifeLock
As Sony continues to struggle to restore service to both the PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment's MMOs following a hacking intrusion that resulted in millions of customer identities being compromised, players are understandably concerned about how secure their information is with similar companies. Even though Sony promised to provide a year's worth of identity theft protection for affected customers, part of the responsibility for safeguarding against such theft lies with us. As such, we spoke with Mike Prusinski, the Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications for LifeLock, an identity theft protection service. We asked him about what we should be doing to protect our identities online -- and what Sony could have done better in the first place. Massively: What are the most common ways that people have their identities stolen? Mike Prusinski: Though there are no statistics that point to one way over another, consumers get their personal information lost through stolen laptops, hackers, stolen mail, trash, skimming devices, scams (email, phone calls and personal visits), peer-to-peer networks and public websites.
News Corp. set to unload Myspace?
We hate to say it, but we could see this coming a mile down the road: After Myspace (or, as the kids say, my[_____]) relaunched itself as an entertainment portal to little effect late last year, and then the company went and laid off fifty percent of its staff, what's the next step? Tears -- a flood of bitter, bitter tears. And after that? Well, it looks like News Corp. is considering a couple options. As COO Chase Carey said on a recent earnings call, "The new MySpace has been very well received by the market and we have some very encouraging metrics. But the plan to allow MySpace to reach it's full potential may be best achieved under a new owner." Continuing with the theme, he told Paid Content the following: "There's been a lot of interest, because there's been some indication we're pursuing this path. We'll consider all options... it could be a sale, it could be an investor coming in to it, it could be us staying in with a restructured ownership structure with management." Now, that's a whole bunch of "corporate speak" there, and while the future is up in the air, we're fairly sure that if you called our man Chase and offered him cold, hard cash, you could probably take Myspace off his hands at a fairly reasonable price. Make sure you ask him to throw in the Blingees for free.
UK voice choir sings Please Retweet Me song for charity, probably has no idea what it means (video)
So here's the deal: the UK Meningitis Trust wants to help raise awareness about the disease it's dedicated to battling and has a 30-strong male voice choir at its disposal to do it with. How does it reach the widest possible audience? If your ideas include namedropping every major social media site set up over the last decade, a nod to the iPhone versus Android dichotomy, and the use of Yahoo as a bad pun, then you must be the guy responsible for putting together the video after the break. Congratulations, it's awesome. The behind-the-scenes footage with these old crooners isn't too terrible either.
Wall Street Journal says apps may violate privacy, fingers MySpace and Pandora
You might have heard how careless some third-party apps can be with your personal data, but it may not yet have hit home -- offenders can include must-have programs like MySpace and Pandora, too. The Wall Street Journal tested 101 popular apps for iPhone and Android and discovered that over half transmitted unique device identifiers (UDID) to a flock of advertisers without so much as a prompt, and that some (including Pandora) even transmitted a user's age, gender and location to better target their marks. Now, before you boycott your favorite music apps, you might want to hear the other side of the story, which is that all this data is typically processed in batches and anonymized so that advertisers can't necessarily separate you from the crowd. However, the worry is that there may be little stopping nefarious individuals from creating a database that links your UDID to all this other data you send out. It's a juicy proposition for targeted advertising, sure, but also potentially real-world crime, so we doubt this will be the last we hear of UDID privacy scares.
Myspace gets a reboot, Billo's profile still hopelessly under-designed (video)
That's right, it's spelled Myspace now (no longer with the capital "s"). And if you want to do the logo any justice, you have to take the "space" literally, so it comes out something like: my[____]. Get it? We don't, but that isn't stopping the News Corp-owned social networking site and haunt for all things tweenaged and tweemo (as well as the world's foremost Blingee! repository) from re-launching with a new design, a new homepage, and a new focus as an entertainment portal. Makes sense to us, although we really just wish they'd get around to production on that Myspace Media Player already. Get a preview for yourself after the break.
New York judge rules 'private' Facebook content can be used as evidence in court
Privacy? On the internet!? You've got to be joking. That has, more or less, been the reaction of New York Justice Jeffrey Spinner when faced with the issue of deciding whether or not content posted to the private sections of Facebook and MySpace should be made available as evidence in court. To be honest, it shouldn't come as a shock to anyone, since typically private information -- like emails and home contents -- can regularly be thrown into the public light when there's "a reasonable likelihood" it may turn up evidence material to a trial's outcome. Bring that tradition to the internet -- where publishing anything comes with an inherent desire to disseminate or share that info -- and the lady claiming for personal injuries against a chair company shouldn't be surprised her "private" snaps are being requested. You know, in case they show her doing the limbo on a tropical isle somewhere. Then again, she could always move to California, where a local judge answered pretty much the same question in a converse fashion. Laws, it's all about how you interpret them.
Visualized: world's most trafficked websites and their favicons
We knew Google Search was an iconic service (we had to), but seeing it dwarf the rest of the web like this is pretty humbling. This here map of the internets uses Alexa data from earlier this year to assign the favicon dimensions of each of the top 288,945 sites around the world. Oh, and if you don't have an icon sidled up next to your URL, tough luck, you're not on here. See how many you can spot before your eyes start bleeding, then hit up the source to look up your favorite sites. As to your absolute favoritest site of them all, you can spot us somewhere in the space between vBulletin and Wikipedia.
Microsoft Kinect to go on sale in November, somewhere
What you're looking at is the latest status update to the Xbox MySpace page showing a November release for Microsoft Natal Kinect. You know, just in case you were looking for something to purchase in the run up to the holidays. How much is the big question now. Update: John was kind enough to ping us and let us know about this mention of a November release date on a UK Microsoft press page, which we also have a picture of below. This would seem to imply it'll also be hitting Europe before the end of the year, but we'll find out when the timer on that page hits zero and Microsoft's second big event of the show kicks off. We'll be there. [Thanks, Bharat R.]
MySpace launches Games Lab, aims to tackle social gaming
Like a pokey little puppy, social network MySpace has announced that it's starting up a Games Lab to try and beef up the gaming space on the site. A pilot program has been underway for a while now with TheBroth and Meez, and MySpace has now announced Playdom as a partner in building the platform. Rival network Facebook has been growing in leaps and bounds, especially in the gaming space, but now MySpace wants to leapfrog its success on the music side into social games. Will it work? There's a lot of money still to be made in social games, and there's no reason why MySpace couldn't grab its own piece of the pie. But MySpace is certainly coming late to the game, so if it can garner an audience, it'll likely be a fraction of what Facebook already has running.
GDC: MySpace making a push into games, hoping it'll be as popular as music
While we've yet to meet those amongst you reppin' Farmville and swearing allegiance to Facebook, we worry that today's announcement of MySpace making a stronger push into the casual gaming market may stir those folks from their dismal, musty resting places. Alongside a revamped and relaunched gaming section on the site (the "MySpace Games Gallery"), co-president Mike Jones told GamesIndustry.biz that the company plans on pushing into the gaming world in the same way it's pushed into the music world. "Just as they use MySpace to discover and listen to music, I want them to use MySpace to discover and play games," he said in an interview this week. One of the ways that Jones plans on implementing the new initiative is by making game suggestions to new users at the same time the site normally suggests music a new user might like. "We're making sure that when users sign up to MySpace, on the first screen after sign-up they have recommendations, which include games and bands -- at the same time ... that's getting the user initially seeded with the content." Unfortunately, though, Jones didn't say a peep about games that go a bit deeper than the standard Mafia Wars fare we've come to expect from social networks and their free-to-play games.
Richard Garriott re-enters games atmosphere with new social media project: Portalarium
Known spacefarer and castle-owner Richard Garriott isn't going to let a relatively unsuccessful MMORPG launch keep him down. Lord British himself, along with former NCSoft colleagues Dallas Snell, Fred Schmidt and Stephen Nichols, has revealed the launch of a "broad-based" social media company dubbed Portalarium. The outfit is working to first offer "online game apps" and then hopes to expand into "open learning, open health, open science/environment, open government and much more." Whatever that means. The announcement was kind enough to detail the company's first big project: The Portalarium Player, a browser plug-in that allows games developed on a number of platforms (i.e., not just Flash) to work within the confines of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Garriott is speaking more about the young company's future at D.I.C.E. -- so we'll flag him down later today to find out what gamers can expect from the studio. (At the very least, we hope to get some totally awesome space stories.)
Game-related startups raise $600 million in 2009, down 36%
Game-related startup companies raised $600 million throughout 2009, according to GamesBeat's analysis. And while $600 million is a lot of money if you're, say, trying to sell a shooter based on the art of modern warfare, it's not quite that much when you're an up-and-coming game developer. Total investments in the field were actually down by 36% since last year. That's not a bubble bursting, but it does mean that startup investors might be a little more careful with their money in the year to come. The biggest winners in the scene include Zynga, makers of Mafia Wars and a few other popular Facebook titles, who nabbed a big $180 million investment from a Russian technology company, and Playdom. You may not have played Sorority Life, the company's MySpace hit, but Lightspeed Venture Partners must have, because it invested $43 million in the company. If there's a theme here, it's social networking and online games: PopCap is probably the highest traditional game developer on the list, but even its $22.5 million investment was marked for putting its games on the web, mobile platforms, and social networks. Of course, that pull doesn't include the buck we gave them for Peggle.
Video: Arduino-based 'insecure, egotistical' robot band
One part gadget, one part art project, and 100% awesome, the Cybraphon is a MacBook powered, Arduino-based mechanical band housed in an antique wardrobe. Including an organ, cymbals, a motor-driven Indian Shruti box (played with 13 robotic servos, no less), and a gramophone, it relies on infrared motion detectors to sense when it has an audience. A number of factors, including the amount of attention it gets on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, help the device determine its "mood," which in turn determines when the "band" plays, and what material it selects. According to one of the artist / inventors, the Cybraphon is a "tongue-in-cheek comment on people's obsession with online celebrity. We modeled it on an insecure, egotistical band." That's our favorite kind! And you know, the thing doesn't sound half bad. Check it out for yourself after the break.
The world is safe: Twilight MMO not a confirmed project
var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/gaming_news/The_world_is_safe_Twilight_MMO_not_a_confirmed_project'; Thanks to some astute Joystiq commenters and a MySpace photo of a newspaper article, it seems we might all breathe a collective sigh of relief. The Twilight MMO isn't an official, confirmed project as of yet. The current Twilight: The Video Game is being created by Brandon Gardner, a student of game design from Blountstown, Florida. BrainJunk Studios currently consists of a volunteer staff, all working together on the concept of a Twilight game. Currently, Gardner is still studying with Westwood College Online, seeking out a bachelor's degree in game design as he works on his pet project. So, in conclusion, we're all temporarily spared... at least for the time being.
