After months of speculation, MySpace relaunched its music site in the U.S. with the support of the four major recording companies. The new site comes with free streaming music and the ability to create and share playlists. MySpace needed to revamp the site, as we wrote about in today’s paper, to keep up with fast-moving music upstarts such as iMeem and Last.fm.

Reviews so far have been mixed. It’s like Napster… with a business model, says AllThingsD. You can tell the lawyers got out of the way, says paidContent, because “if the song is in the catalog, you can listen to what you want, as many times as you want, in any order you want, without interruption.”

But it’s still too cluttered, says Silicon Alley Insider. That’s fine if MySpace Music wants to just keep its current audience happy. Not so good if it wants to be the central music stop on the Internet. Just 14% of people online have accessed music via social networks, according to the NPD Group. That leaves a lot of people who haven’t found their social network music hangout yet and could make MySpace their place.

We’ve been playing around with it this morning and found that searching for some songs or a particular artist can be a challenge, an experience shared by Sonal Gandhi, an analyst at Jupiter Research, who told us she had the same problem, even with some of the featured artists.

“It’s not a full offering,” she said. “In the Web world, companies launch and improve on it, and over time, it becomes better. That’s MySpace’s strategy.”

It’s also not clear how to buy a song for some of the artists, something others such as Idolator have experienced when trying to buy the Top 10 digital tracks. Amazon is powering the e-commerce portion of the site, which one would think would be well-oiled since it is one of the few ways to get hard cash.

Matt Graves, vice president of marketing at iMeem, the music-centric social network, said it’s great that MySpace lets users build playlists. But the constraints MySpace appears to place on the playlist, such as limiting the number of songs and restricting where people listen to the music, may be a problem for many.

“On iMeem, the length of your playlist is limited only by your imagination,” he said.

Of course, iMeem and others have a stake in the MySpace launch too: They hope that MySpace will bring a lot of attention to music social services without sucking up all the advertising dollars.

– Michelle Quinn and Swati Pandey

Social network users are much heavier consumers of digital content including SMS, mobile email, photos, music, games and mobile TV than mobile phone service subscribers.

The revelation comes from recent research published by industry analyst ABI Research which canvassed 1,000 mobile subscribers and just over 500 social network mobile subscribers in the US.

Three quarters of the latter group were aged between 18 and 30, and were twice as likely to own a smartphone as their non-networked equivalents.

“The fact that online social networkers consume more mobile content and media than mobile subscribers who are not into online networking may not be really surprising,” said principal analyst Nick Holland.

“However, what we have long suspected is confirmed by the numbers: for most kinds of mobile content, online social networkers consume about twice as much as their non-networked peers.”

The driving force behind online social networkers’ consumption of mobile media is that they are on average younger and more tech-savvy.

Also, many social networks are organised around a specific media-related interest such as photography or music.

“Advertising on social networks is not working particularly well, so promotion of mobile content on online social network sites should be a high priority for mobile operators, content distributors, media companies and advertisers,” said Holland.

Many members of the so-called Web 2.0 generation of Internet companies, such as social-networking sites, blogs and other similar “social media,” have made little revenue, the Financial Times reported.Roger Lee, a partner at Battery Ventures, told the FT there is going to be a “shakeout” in the industry in the next year or two, with many Web 2.0 companies disappearing.
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It’s emerged as one of the most popular ways to connect with friends, family and long-lost acquaintances, but nearly 25% of Canadians believe Facebook has played a more negative than positive role in society, a new poll suggests. The Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey, conducted March 27 to 30, asked more than 1,000 people about the social networking site’s impact on society.

While 40% said Facebook was a positive force, 24% said it played a more negative role.

The remainder declined to take a stand.

“There’s no question it looks, to a certain number of people, as something that can be used as much for negative purposes as for positive purposes,” Harris-Decima spokesman Bruce Anderson said from Ottawa.

Since launching as a university-only website in 2004, Facebook has exploded into a cultural phenomenon claiming to have more than 70 million users worldwide.

ONEsite, Inc., the leading provider of enterprise community and social networking software, announced today the launch of its new Class A datacenter and a series of wide ranging performance enhancements to the patent-pending technology of the ONEsite Platform.“It took two years to grow through 1 million users and now we are growing at 1 million users every two months,” said Bob Crull, ONEsite’s CEO. “Our platform is both flexible and fast. If a company wants to engage their users, we have the software and infrastructure to ensure it is a pleasant experience.”

With media and entertainment clients that include Clear Channel and Univision, ONEsite has created a system that can not only handle a high volume of day to day traffic, but the capability to deliver a consistent user experience even under an intense spike in traffic. The latest enhancements provide a 10x increase in performance and the capability to handle over 20 million users with hardware on hand and rapidly scale to support exponential growth.

The ONEsite platform is architected to scale horizontally. Its caching strategy delivers 70-90% of pages directly from the cache while still providing users with an interactive, dynamic experience. The newly launched datacenter and architecture upgrades greatly enhance the effectiveness and capacity of its proprietary clustered server environment.

ONEsite maintains dual datacenters in Oklahoma City and is able to provide consistent operations with the loss of either datacenter. The company is a subsidiary of Catalog.com with a 14 year tradition of delivering innovative, scalability internet applications and services. Ineffective scalability that has crippled many growing social networks and their providers does not affect the ONEsite platform which has been specifically architected to provide the performance and scalability critical to the success of its clients.

About ONEsite
ONEsite offers full-featured social networking platform built on patent-pending technology. Its open, scalable architecture provides one of the highest levels of functionality, flexibility, reliability, and interoperability in the industry. ONEsite technology is complemented by a talented and experienced team that delivers more enterprise-class community destinations than any other white-label social networking provider.

ONEsite has a proven ability to create the distinctive, engaging and successful social experiences demanded by leading media, entertainment and lifestyle brands including Clear Channel and Univision. ONEsite offices are located in Oklahoma City, Los Angeles and Seattle with expansion underway in New York and London.

For more information visit: www.onesite.com .