uTongo - Do you?

Facebook, the MySpace for college students, just raised another 25 Million Dollar funding by Greylock Partners. Recently Facebook made the headlines by declining an offer of $780, shooting for 2 billion instead. But as TechCrunch says, they face the problem of owning their market without much space for further growth.

It looks as if it is time for the inventor of Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction to leave the stage: Senator John McCain is joining several retired generals who no longer have any confidence in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. The main culprit her is that the Iraq war was done without any sensible exit strategy, and now Rumsfeld is seen as the person responsible for the current disaster there.

There are many similarities between the recent Italian elections, and the latest American election. In both elections the candidates have been extremely close, both split the country, and in both elections there have been reported ‘irregularities’. While Kerry passed on the opportunity of a recount, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi is still contesting the election, refusing to admit defeat.

I have to agree with this blogger when he says it’s no good for demoracy when each close election gets contested. But then, it never seemed as if Berlusconi cared for democracy a lot, having changed Italy’s constitution in his own favor several times. I sure hope Prodi stays the winner in this race for president.

So it’s not allways the grumpy 50 year old guys hitting on schoolgirls that get caught on MySpace: This time it is Pamela Rogers Turner, also known as ‘Miss Monday Nitro’ from the wrestling circus, who just blew up her probation. She had been convicted before for sex with a 13-year-old student. Her MySpace page has been cancelled, but is archived here.

As it seems, the networking site MySpace is not only a traffic phenomenon in itself, but also a traffic generator and business opportunity for clever webmasters. Sites offering MySpace themes or user support are big business these days, sometimes earning their webmasters six figure incomes.

I guess a key component of a well running MySpace support site would be getting enough users to visit the site. Apart from the usual SEO it seems to be a clever strategy to get users out of the MySpace community itself. Having a huge friends network will help with this. Apparently, there is allready a market for ready to buy MySpace accounts with lots of friends, you even find those on eBay. I haven’t been on the site a lot, but I guess it is a lot of work to get a few thousand contacts. Wonder if it pays off?