This morning Pinterest co-founders Ben Silberman, Paul Sciarra and Yashwanth Nelapati woke up to a barrage of tweets, “So @myspace has completely ripped off @pinterest. It really pisses me off when an old, tired hack tries to undermine hardworking inovators. [sic]” Myspace revealed its new redesign last night and Pinterest users quickly picked up on the similarities between the two site aesthetics, leading to an intense Twitter debate.

The offsite grid layout used by both Myspace and Pinterest is nothing new; Lazyfeed, http://enjoysthin.gs and countless other sites have a similar design. But the fact that former Myspace Director of Technology Dave Peck emailed Pinterest back in March asking for an advance invite is interesting, especially when you read the email.

Founder Silberman told TechCrunch, “The Myspace product team joined our site really early and so I’m sure they took inspiration from it. Our impression was that they took some information and we were touched that our users were vocal about it.”

However, Silberman who retweeted the accusations from the official Pinterest account this morning, emphasized, “I wouldn’t go as far as saying they ripped it off. They’re probably in tune with organizing friends around interests after they missed the boat on friends,” referring to how you can now use Myspace to follow Topics pages.

Pinterest is still invite only and is currently seeking funding. Despite being in stealth mode, the social cataloguing startup has 17,000 users and is about to experience it’s one millionth “pin.” Silberman plans on launching in a couple of months, encouraged by all the user support today, “It’s cool when you’re a small company and your users stick up for you.”

Myspace had 90 million users this September according to comScore, marking a 18% drop from last year. This recent design and concept overhaul was an attempt to win back some of the traffic lost to competitors like Facebook.

Myspace screencap via The Guardian

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Myspace Accused Of Ripping Off Stealth Startup Pinterest

A report in the Wall Street Journal this evening reveals that Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and a number of other popular social sites are passing along data that advertisers could potentially use to identify users who click their ads. The article is focused on Facebook in particular, which appears to have been passing along the most data of the aforementioned sites and has also been embroiled in a major privacy controversy.

The Journal article doesn’t get into too much technical detail, but it sounds like Facebook and the others are failing to scrub ‘referring’ URLs that are always passed along whenever a user clicks a link. This is actually normal behavior — typically when you click a link on a website, the site you’re being directed to will get to see where you came from. The issue is that these social sites include some identifying information as part of their URLs; when you visit a friend’s Facebook profile, the resulting URL might include both your friend’s username and your Facebook ID, which could be used to associate you with the ads you’re clicking on.

That said, the Journal reports that the ad companies it contacted had not used the data:

Several large advertising companies identified by the Journal as receiving the data, including Google Inc.’s DoubleClick and Yahoo Inc.’s Right Media, said they were unaware of the data being sent to them from the social-networking sites, and said they haven’t made use of it.

However, the article doesn’t say that all ad networks that placed ads on Facebook were ignoring the data. We’ve reached out to Facebook to ask if it’s possible that smaller networks could have leveraged it.

The WSJ article notes that the discovery was pointed out back in August by researchers from AT&T Labs and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, but that the issue has persisted until this morning (Facebook and MySpace have now “rewritten some of the offending computer code”).

Update: The Twitter issue mentioned in the WSJ seems to be much less of an problem (it doesn’t even have ads yet).
Image via alancleaver

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WSJ: Facebook, MySpace & Others Share Identifying User Data With…

Here’s a ray of product sunshine in an otherwise overcast MySpace world. Tonight they are launching a new MySpace events and calendar platform that integrates technology from MySpace Music, iLike, Social Plan and Facebook Connect (told you). It includes new tools for Artists to add concert events and allows users to add those events, share them, and even purchase tickets right from MySpace. It’s an elegant weaving of products that plays to a core strength of MySpace – music, and a huge database of event information – around 1 million concert events in 2010 alone. You can see the new MySpace Events page here.

It’s also a huge improvement from the existing event and calendaring apps on MySpace. Here’s what a concert event used to look like on MySpace:

Here’s what an event might look like now, after the new launch:

Users are also encouraged to share events with friends in the MySpace stream, on Facebook or on Twitter. And artists are being given new tools to actually create attractive concert listings. All of these events are aggregated into the users’ MySpace Calendars along with their normal calendar data.

In the coming months, says MySpace, they’ll add additional features around mobile access, concert notifications and movies and DVD releases and premiers.

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MySpace Gets Serious About Events

The problem with all of these people who are walking out the door at MySpace isn’t so much the number of them, because MySpace is trying to replace them by hiring more people. It’s the fact that the best people are leaving, and taking a lot of the knowledge base with them.

Three star senior employees left to go to cross-town startup Gravity, we reported earlier this week. And tonight we’ve heard that Jeff Webber, the engineering director that oversees the email, instant messaging and other “communications” platforms for MySpace, resigned earlier this week as well to join a startup. He’s been at MySpace for nearly three years and was one of the star engineers and leaders, says one source.

Other recent departures – VP and General Manager of Mobile John Faith, SVP User Experience Katie Geminder and most of her team. And of course CEO Owen Van Natta. And lots more as well, only a few of which we’ve reported.

The company has no direction, says everyone we talk to at MySpace except the top execs, and internal politics are the only thing that seem to matter. Ambitious new projects like Remaking MySpace have been thrown away just because the wrong exec supported it. Anyone who actually wants to build products has left or is looking for a new job, say many, many sources.

If you’re a MySpace employee and feel differently, please contact us anonymously. Because right now all we see is a ton of fluff and absurdity coming from the top, and massive morale problems at the middle management ranks.

The title of this post is actually a recent quote from a (now former) MySpace employee, and it seems to be accurate. They say a company has to hit rock bottom before it can even think about rebuilding into something new. If that’s the case, the time to start rebuilding is, apparently, right about now. But in our opinion MySpace has no chance at all until it is free of the News Corp. death grip.

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MySpace’s Mid Level Management Structure Is Crumbling

In the summer of 2009 MySpace hired Katie Germinder, Facebook’s Director of User Experience and Design, as an SVP. Her primary job was to assemble a “swat team” of leading outside designers and user interface experts and re-imagine MySpace from the ground up. That team was made up of four people – including two former Apple designers and one ex-Facebooker – and worked out of a conference room in MySpace’s San Francisco offices for six months. They were creating a new site, located at remakingmyspace.com, and it was going to launch sometime right about now.

RemakingMySpace was going to be a new version of MySpace with every piece of legacy stuff thrown out the door. Users and employees would be solicited for input – to get new ideas and vote on already submitted ones – to rebuild the service brick by brick. Most of the work over the last six months was spent reimagining the design in various ways that would be shown to users, and building tools for the submission and consideration of new ideas. And “users” was broadly defined to include input from artists and bands, advertisers, etc.

It was bold, controversial and progressive. And now it’s also very, very dead. Germinder left MySpace last week. And the guy who hired her, former CEO Owen Van Natta, was terminated the week before.

So what happened? The project was trouble from the start. Germinder was strongly pushing the project, obviously, and had the support of Van Natta. But she was working outside of Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn’s organization. Hirschhorn hated the idea from the start, say multiple sources, and constantly worked to undermine it. He favored a much more straightforward redesign effort. And, sources say, VP Product Mike Macadaan was also an outsider to the project, and strongly disapproved say of the whole process.

None of that mattered as long as Van Natta was CEO and was able to push the project along. But once he was gone and Mike Jones and Hirschhorn took over as co-presidents, remakingmyspace was history. Within a day the team was dissolved and moved back into the product organization. The Apple designers, there as consultants, will likely be leaving shortly as their contracts expire.

We’ve spoken with sources on both sides of this. Some say that the the consultants were way too expensive and Hirschhorn and Jones thought the pace of the project was too slow. But others who knew about the project (the site was live for some MySpace employees) thought it was brilliant, and noted that six months wasn’t all that long for a project of this scope. There was genuine excitement within MySpace over remakingmyspace.com, and some are disgusted that it was all thrown away.

One thing that strikes us as odd is the fact that the chief complaints – expense and time – were no longer relevant. The project was effectively done and the expense of it was behind them. “This was killed out of pure vindictiveness,” says one source. Another said that Hirschhorn never even bothered to really understand it, he just wanted it killed.

So what comes next? A straightforward redesign that won’t rock the boat, says one source. Another says that many of the ideas from remakingmyspace will eventually make their way into whatever MySpace launches. Officially, all MySpace will say is “The reimagination of MySpace’s user interface is a top priority. Under Jason Hirschhorn, VP of Product Mike Macadaan and his team are leading the charge to redesign the site and create a beautiful new and exciting environment for our users.”

We’re now trying to track down and verify screen shots and the new logo for remakingmyspace.com. Stay tuned for updates.

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RemakingMySpace: Controversial. Bold. Progressive. And Dead.

MySpace’s new slogan, and the theme of their new product strategy, will be “Discover and be Discovered,” we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. This will be their differentiating factor from Facebook, execs told employees at an all hands meeting last Thursday.

The meeting was called in the wake of the firing of CEO Owen Van Natta and the related promotions of Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn to co-presidents. The meeting, which was held in the courtyard of MySpace’s Los Angeles headquarters to accomodate 600 or employees, was also broadcast to other offices around the world.

The meeting began, say sources, with a discussion of the drama around the company over the last several weeks. Parent company News Corp’s Digital Chief Jon Miller apparently didn’t mince words, saying that Van Natta wasn’t moving fast enough and that there was too much conflict among the executive team. Hirschhorn also denied rumors that he ever considered leaving the company, which is contrary to the statements of about a dozen sources who’ve said the opposite to us.

Miller also reiterated News Corp.’s commitment to MySpace and outlined how the co-president structure will work. “They get along really well,” he reportedly said. Hirschhorn handles product vision, Jones handles execution.

More importantly, MySpace’s go forward vision was presented to employees, say our sources, and it was all about a single feature thrust that they’re calling “Discovery.”

The idea is to hit users over the head with new stuff when they come to MySpace. New people they should be meeting. Movie trailers they should watch. Games they may want to play (perhaps against other MySpace users), music they should listen to, articles they should read. Etc. The activity stream that MySpace recently launched will be the backbone of Discovery, but other MySpace products will feed into this as well.

If they get this right, the thinking goes, people will want to visit the site over and over again to see what new stuff they can do.

This is effectively a recommendation engine around new content, says one source, but MySpace doesn’t want people calling it that. Still, the idea is that an algorithm (and advertisers) will determine what stuff you might like (or tolerate, in the case of ads) based on what other users are liking.

The goal is to give users something to do on MySpace that’s somewhat different than Facebook. And get them to come back often.

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MySpace’s Hail Mary Strategy: “Discovery”

Yesterday, Inside Facebook reported on a nifty MySpace feature called Fan Video that allows users to pull in their Facebook profile photos using Facebook Connect — a notable move given the sites’ longtime rivalry. Some other outlets ran with the story, with CNET calling it “hard evidence that MySpace is committed to using the technology on its site.” As it turns out, that probably isn’t the case: we’re hearing that this implementation was only integrated as a one-off for Fan Video, and that it is not indicative of a MySpace move to embrace Facebook Connect on a wider scale.

In fact, we’re hearing that MySpace hasn’t even decided if they’re going to implement Facebook Connect on a wide scale at all, despite the rumors that have been circling for months.

Fan Video was built as a promotion for the UK launch of MySpace Music in December. The app is simple: it imports your profile photo using either MySpaceID or Facebook Connect, and inserts it into one of a half dozen music videos from big name artists like Alicia Keys and 50 Cent. The results are actually pretty entertaining — I now have a video of Alicia Keys singing a love song as she gazes longingly at a photo of me. But we’re hearing that the app didn’t come directly from MySpace — it was actually built by a third party under commission.

In related news, we’ve recently heard that Twitter is close to launching their answer to Facebook Connect.

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MySpace Fan Video Not Indicative Of Wider Facebook Connect Rollout

Schapp stumbled upon the exploit and contacted both Facebook and MySpace. According to his blog MySpace has since fixed the bug, and while his blog indicates that Facebook is still working on it we’ve confirmed that they’ve fixed it as well (we’re waiting on a statement from MySpace). So what exactly could the exploit do? From Schapp’s blog:

You don’t need much time to think of all the ways this could be exploited. All what has to happen is a active session, or a “auto login”-cookie and a URL which hosts a exploiting Flash file. For example when accessed, a automatic “post update” could be made, that would lure friends of the user to access the exploit URL, and the exploit would spread virally. An more invasive and hidden exploit could harvest all the users personal photo’s, data and messages to a central server without any trace, and there is no reason why this wouldn’t be happening already with both Facebook and MySpace data.

In other words, if you’ve ever checked that ‘remember me’ button on Facebook or MySpace’s login screen and have at any point viewed a Flash app taking advantage of the exploit, it’s possible that all of your data was compromised. You wouldn’t even have to neccesarily open anything — in Facebook’s case, if one of the infected items showed up in your News Feed you could have your data stolen without ever knowing it. Yeah, that’s pretty damn scary. For what it’s worth, Facebook gave us this statement:

The security of our users is a top priority for Facebook and we worked with the researcher who identified the issue to fix it. We have not received any reports that it was ever exploited.

Of course, Schapp pretty clearly writes that there’s no way for a user to tell if their data was harvested, so for all we know it could have been used by multiple developers for months or longer (Facebook is currently investigating how long the bug may have existed). Granted, Schapp could be the first developer to ever stumble across the exploit. But the potential of this bug is so huge — allowing a developer to mine all of the data for any user who accessed their app — that less honest developers may well have used the hack for their own benefit. Facebook has previously said that there are a whopping 300,000 developers building on its platform. And we’ve seen time and time again that some of those developers are not opposed to Black Hat tactics. MySpace has seen its own share of problems.

This is obviously bad news for both social networks, but Facebook in particular has long been heralded as the safer of the two, with its extensive privacy settings and authentic identities. Yet the site has repeatedly seen glitches in its security. Today’s bug is by far the worst vulnerability in recent memory.

The security vulnerability works by taking advantage of an oversight in a crossdomain.xml configuration file, which is used by Flash applets to determine if an application has permission to access data on that domain. The crossdomain.xml files at Facebook and MySpace were allowing any applet from any other domain to access data and the API. Combined with browsers keeping a record of your logged in session if you have checked ‘remember me’, the vulnerability means that an invisible Flash applet on any website you visit would be able to read out all your data and send it away somewhere else. For more on cross-domain requests and security, there is a write up explaining all the details.

If you’re interested in the nature of the exploit itself, head over to Schapp’s blog for a full description of how he stumbled on it.

Image by Lisanne!

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Massive Facebook and MySpace Flash Vulnerability Exposes User Data

A big part of the debate about the lead gen scams plaguing Facebook and MySpace via social games is over how much money is being made on these “offers.” Zynga, by far the most successful at building and monetizing these games, is now telling us exactly how much – 1/3 of total revenues, according to Andrew Trader, a co-founder of Zynga:

Andrew Trader, co-founder of Zynga, said the company makes about a third of its revenue from advertising and another third from virtual goods transactions. The last third comes from companies that provide commercial offers, trading Netflix memberships and marketing surveys for in-game cash.

Zynga revenue guesses range all over the place, but are likely $250 million a year or more. That means $80+ million/year is being brought in from legitimate offers like Netflix subscriptions, as well as the really smelly stuff like recurring mobile phone and learning CD subscriptions that trick users into paying big dollars for little or no return value.

What percentage of offer revenue is scammy? We believe it varies over time, and is heading in the wrong direction. Legitimate advertisers like Netflix and Blockbuster, hit with countless laundered subscriptions from repeat subscripers, are said to be dramatically lowering bounty fees paid on signup. Far less scrupulous advertisers like Video Professor and Tatto take their place.

HotOrNot cofounder James Hong said it best in a comment to our post yesterday outlining the scams: “In a nutshell, the offers that monetize the best are the ones that scam/trick users. Sure we had netflix ads show up, and clearly those do convert to some degree, but i’m pretty sure most of the money ended up getting our users hooked into auto-recurring SMS subscriptions for horoscopes and stuff.”

Offerpal and others, who provide these offers to game developers, try to downplay the percentage of revenue that comes from scams. Clearly they are obfuscating the truth, to put it kindly.

Facebook and MySpace must takes steps to address this.

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Scamville: Zynga Says 1/3 Of Revenue Comes From Lead Gen And Other…

MySpace has just announced the appointment of four new members to its executive team, which saw a major shakeup last April. The new hires include Nada Stirratt, who will serve as Chief Revenue Officer and Dustin Finer, who is now Chief People Officer. Joining them will be iLike founders (and brothers) Ali Partovi, who is now SVP of Business Development based in San Francisco, and Hadi Partovi as SVP of Technology, based out of Seattle.

MySpace acquired streaming music service iLike in August for $20 million.

Other recent MySpace hires include Mark Rosenbaum as CFO and Alex Maghen as CTO (he was formerly CTO of MySpace Music, now he heads technology at MySpace proper as well).

Below is MySpace’s bio about Stirratt, who served as EVP of Digital Advertising at MTV before joining MySpace:

Prior to MySpace, Stirratt served as Executive Vice President of Digital Advertising at MTV Networks where she oversaw advertising sales and strategy, ad operations, Digital Fusion-integrated marketing, and Tribes, the company’s third-party vertical affiliate network. Before MTV, Nada served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of advertising sales at Advertising.com. Earlier in her career, Stirratt worked in ad sales and business development for such entertainment brands as AOL-Time Warner, Moviefone, Allure and Cosmopolitan.

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MySpace Fills Out Executive Roster With New Hires, iLike Execs