uTongo - Do you?

Brasilian model Daniela Cicarelli has sued YouTube for repeatedly publishing a video of Daniela having sex on the beach with her boyfriend Tato Malzoni. A Brasilian court now decided that YouTube would have to be shut down as long as the sex video becomes available to UTube users. Google, the owner of YouTube, got into trouble with Brasilian courts before when their Orkut platform got attacked because people were using it to trade child porn.

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.

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?

Posting videos from YouTube is the latest craze among bloggers. But lets not forget, video sharing is a big market, and there are other serious competitors with interesting features as well. DVGuru compares ten video sharing sites (vimeo, eyespot, jumpcut, ourmedia, vSocial, Google Video, grouper, Revver, videoEgg and of coure YouTube) in a very interesting post.

Each of them has it’s own strengths and weaknesses, and it is hard to decide on a clear winner. Personally I like the featureset of vSocial a lot, but there seem to be issues with the file upload there.