The launch will be soft and low key, with a slow build toward a full roll out well before the end of the year. Some members already have access as part of the company's testing and it is being adjusted with their feedback as part of an iterative process that will be ongoing. MySpace needs to be careful; if they turn on the hose too fast, they could wind up with a huge problem should something go awry. MySpace declined comment.

MySpace reports 130 million members globally, 70 million in the U.S. It's unclear how the e-mail will roll out and whether it will be available outside the U.S. but if MySpace is successful in spreading the service across its members, it quickly could become one of the top e-mail providers.

The MySpace layoffs were rumored for weeks beforehand; the top management was reshuffled in April when News Corp., MySpace's parent company, replaced founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe with former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta, and the Web was rife with murmurs of an imminent retooling of the rest of the office.

Just one year ago MySpace was dominating Facebook in the U.S., pulling in 73.7 million users per month in May 2008 to Facebook's 36 million. While Facebook had surpassed MySpace in global unique visitors the previous month, MySpace's vast advantage in the U.S. still gave the site clout with advertisers.

The move brings the website into line with rival Facebook, which has seen strong growth since it opened up to outside programmers.

Facebook has become a portal for services such as video, audio and photos since the change.

MySpace has more than 188 million registered users, compared to the 47 million who use Facebook.

MySpace was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp for $580m in 2005.

"We hoped it would do very well, but we never imagined it would do this well," Mr Murdoch told the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.

The social networking website MySpace has reported a four-fold increase in the number of convicted sex offenders using its service.

The company found more than 29,000 convicted sex offenders in the United States had profiles on MySpace - up from a figure of 7,000 given in May.

MySpace said it was pleased it had identified and removed the profiles of the offenders.

Critics of MySpace call for new laws to make such sites safer for children.

The expected change in approach is a reaction to the success of rival Facebook, which last month unveiled a similar step to open its network to outside developers. Although it has less than half as many users as MySpace in the US, Facebook's approach has won it strong backing from other consumer internet companies, which hope it will give them an easier way to reach the network's 27m members.

More than 1,000 applications and services are already available, letting users do things like publish slideshows of personal pictures to their Facebook pages, or add a box that keeps track of when their favourite bands are playing concerts nearby.

"The [Facebook] platform is interesting," Mr DeWolfe said in an interview with the Financial Times. He argued MySpace's current technology approach gave its users many of the same benefits but said: "We'll probably offer users the choice of both."

The aim was to attract more online companies to create services for MySpace's users. "We'll be bringing in more developers."

You can think of it as TV on Cliff's Notes. Each 'minisode' is three to five minutes long, but Sony and MySpace have assured skeptical viewers that the story arc of the original TV episode remains intact.

On the Minisode Network, you can now watch three shaved-down episodes from a total of 15 TV shows. Many of them, like Starsky & Hutch and Charlie's Angels, predate the average young MySpace user, but a few, like Dilbert, are a bit newer. According to a release from MySpace, new ones will be added each week and more than 500 total will be online by the end of 2007. It's not clear whether this means that new shows will be added as well or if the 'minisodes' will remain restricted to the current 15.

Fans of MySpace and Facebook are divided by much more than which music they like, suggests a study.

A six-month research project has revealed a sharp division along class lines among the American teenagers flocking to the social network sites.

The research suggests those using Facebook come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college.

By contrast, MySpace users tend to get a job after finishing high school rather than continue their education.

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

Most teens who exclusively use Facebook are familiar with and have an opinion about MySpace. These teens are very aware of MySpace and they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy, immature, and "so middle school." They prefer the "clean" look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is "so lame." What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as "glitzy" or "bling" or "fly" (or what my generation would call "phat") by subaltern teens. Terms like "bling" come out of hip-hop culture where showy, sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued. The look and feel of MySpace resonates far better with subaltern communities than it does with the upwardly mobile hegemonic teens. This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I'm sure that a visual analyst would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but aesthetics are more than simply the "eye of the beholder" - they are culturally narrated and replicated. That "clean" or "modern" look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I'm drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.

MySpace will acquire Flektor, a just-launched service that allows users to create widgets from photos, video and text, according to two sources with knowledge of the deal. This comes right after the news of MySpace’s pending acquisition of Photobucket last week for $250-$300 million. This will be a much smaller deal, in the $10-$20 million range, possibly with an earnout.

Flektor competes with more established startups like Slide and RockYou, and launched only a few weeks ago. Still, insiders say that the company has developed a killer set of tools to create slide shows as well as much more elaborate widgets that include audio, video, photos, text, effects and transitions. In our testing v. Slide and RockYou, Flektor came out way ahead in usability and features.

It's an odd acquisition, though, since Photobucket also has a slide creation product that competes with Flektor.

This action by MySpace means that all of the videos and remixes you created will no longer show up on your MySpace profile and comments section. More specifically, if you attempt to add new videos or remixes to your profile, they will be removed.

We are not happy about this and we're pretty sure you're not happy either. We appreciate that you have invested hundreds of thousands of hours using the editing, remixing and management tools and features available only on Photobucket. In particular, you've all been really embracing videos at Photobucket -- to the tune of 50,000 video uploads a day, which is great. Rest assured that your content is being kept safe in your Photubucket album even though it may disappear from your MySpace pages.

We believe that by limiting your ability to personalize your pages with content from any source, MySpace is contradicting the very belief of personal and social media. MySpace became successful because of the creativity of you, its users, and because it offered a forum for self-expression. By severely restricting this freedom, MySpace is showing that it considers you as a commodity which it can treat as it sees fit.

I found him on Facebook.

He's chubby now, sports a cubic zirconia in one ear and a thin beard trimmed tight around the jaw. For religious views, he writes: "SMOKE WEED EVERY DAY." Favourite books: "hahahahahahahahahaha. Who has time to read?" He says he's an exotic dancer at Chip & Dales where he works "as eye candy for money."

This is the guy who tormented me in high school.

He called me a dork. He reminded me daily of how few people liked me. He accused me of being a lesbian in biology class.

His Facebook profile has become a source of constant comfort. Whenever I feel disliked or dorky, I look at his page. His lack of success in life fills me with petty glee.

Unlike others in Generation Y, I use Facebook for more nefarious purposes than just keeping track of my acquaintances or inviting people to parties or sharing photos. I am a shameless snoop. I use it to spy and I'm not afraid to admit it.

In November, MySpace, for the first time, surpassed even Yahoo in the number of Web pages visited by U.S. Internet users, according to comScore Media Metrix, which recorded 38.7 billion page views for MySpace as opposed to 38.05 billion for Yahoo.

The bad news is that MySpace reached this point so fast, just three years after its official launch in November 2003, that it has been forced to address problems of extreme scalability that only a few other organizations have had to tackle.

The result has been periodic overloads on MySpace's Web servers and database, with MySpace users frequently seeing a Web page headlined "Unexpected Error" and other pages that apologize for various functions of the Web site being offline for maintenance. And that's why Drew and other MySpace members who can't send or view messages, update their profiles or perform other routine tasks pepper MySpace forums with complaints.

These days, MySpace seems to be perpetually overloaded, according to Shawn White, director of outside operations for the Keynote Systems performance monitoring service. "It's not uncommon, on any particular day, to see 20% errors logging into the MySpace site, and we've seen it as high as 30% or even 40% from some locations," he says. "Compare that to what you would expect from Yahoo or Salesforce.com, or other sites that are used for commercial purposes, and it would be unacceptable." On an average day, he sees something more like a 1% error rate from other major Web sites.

Teens are not dreaming of portability (like so many adults i meet). They are happy to make new accounts on new sites; they enjoy building out profiles. (Part of this could be that they have a lot more time on their hands.) The idea of taking MySpace material to Facebook when they transition is completely foreign. They're going to a new site, they want to start over.

While this feeling of ephemerality is not universal amongst teens, it's far more prevalent than you'd ever see in adult culture and it has some significant implications for design:

Focusing on "lock-in" will fail with these teens - they don't care if they lose track of something they put hours into building.

Teens are not looking for universal anything; that's far too much of a burden if losing track of things is the norm.

Paying for an account can help truly engaged teens remember their accounts (i haven't found any teen who permanently lost their MMO login) but it can also be a strong deterrent for those accustomed to starting over.

The numbers that people cite concerning accounts created are astoundingly inaccurate and are worthless for talking about usage or unique participants. (added tx to a comment by Rich)

I should note that i don't think that the answer is "help teens remember passwords." I actually think that this tendency to shed is advantageous in the way that we shed clothes every year because the "old me" is no longer relevant. Technology is a bit too obsessed with remembering; there's a lot of value in forgetting.