According to AllThingsD Specific Media has acquired Myspace from News Corp. for $35 million. Reportedly, Myspace’s CEO, Mike Jones, will remain for “an interim period,” and the social network will lay off half of its staff, or about 200 people. Myspace, which has seen a sharp decline in traffic over the years since it was acquired by News Corp in 2005 for $580 million, announced in January that it was laying off 47% of its employees. News Corp. will maintain less than a 5% stake in the compa...

Erik Qualman from Socialnomics recently published a new video that shows the power of social networks today. The most stunning fact, to us, is that social media has surpassed porn as the top activity on the web. The video, which lists a number of compelling facts, also said that — in the United States — Facebook gets more weekly web traffic than Google. Similarly, 20% of all divorces are now being blamed on Facebook. Have you ever thought about taking a class online? This stat may pique your interest: a r...

Horrible news comes from AllThingsD’s NetworkEffect blog Friday morning, as rumors of massive layoffs sullied New Year’s Eve for a social networking pioneer. Myspace may soon find itself full of open space following the dismissal of as much as half of its staff, according to the report. Owned by News Corp., Myspace currently employs 1,100 people, most of whom are located in the U.S. No decisions have been made at this point, and the majority of employees have reportedly been given this past week o...

Social networking is huge these days, and there are a lot of choices. Buzz, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Loopt, Foursquare; the list goes on and on. While all these companies have a slightly different slant on social networking, they all seem to agree on one thing: mobile devices are the future. So we wanted to know… what is/are your mobile social networking client(s) of choice, what mobile OS do your run said client(s) on, and what would you change about that client/service if you could? Most of us here...

Another day, another scandal involving social media websites. Today the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Facebook — along with MySpace, LiveJournal, Hi5, Xanga, Digg and Twitter — have been sending personal information about their users to advertisers without consent. Depending on how much information users opted to make public on their profile, advertising firms such as Google’s DoubleClick and Yahoo’s Right Media were able to obtain information as innocuous as the user’s I...

While many tech geeks who fancy Verizon will be spending the majority of this week debating whether or not to pull the trigger on either the DROID or DROID Eris, today Verizon quietly started selling the LG Chocolate Touch, a non-smartphone with mass market appeal. Equipped with a 3″ touchscreen display and 3.2 megapixel camera, the Chocolate Touch also features support for VZ Navigator, V CAST Music/Video, Visual Voicemail and EV-DO Rev. 0 connectivity. Also of note is a convenience key that leads dire...

Life’s a bitch and so is karma, but AT&T is hoping to change that with the Motorola Karma QA1. A goofy looking dumb phone that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Somerset, the Karma is a media-centric device that has home screen access to both Facebook and MySpace as well as support for email, IM, MMS and threaded SMS. In terms of hardware, the quad-band EDGE/dual-band HSDPA Karma packs a sliding QWERTY keypad, 2.5-inch QVGA display, 2 megapixel camera, aGPS, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, 3.5mm headphon...

We’ve been hearing about Samsung introducing a 12 megapixel camera phone since the beginning of this year and this morning the device that many of you have been praying for has been announced in the M8910 Pixon12. With specs that include a 3.1-inch AMOLED touchscreen display (Samsung claims it has a contrast ratio of 10,000:1), quad-band GSM/EDGE / dual-band HSPA (900/2100MHz), Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth 2.1, FM tuner with RDS and 150MB of internal memory that’s expandable to 16GB via microSD, it appea...

Today Nokia announced three new devices that it hopes will makes serious inroads in emerging markets. While they certainly aren’t much to write home about from a phoneaholic’s perspective, they are definitely interesting in that they place particular emphasis on entertainment and social media. Nokia seemingly feels the time is right to thrust mobile internet and social networking upon the up and coming masses and we’re more than eager to see how it works out. Provided data costs are reasonab...

Not happy to let the T-Mobile Sidekick be the only device to keep its name, T-Mobile has, as you all know, released the update to the Sidekick LX named… the Sidekick LX. Similarities don’t end there, however. We’ve covered the device a little bit but we’ve now got a unit of our own and in addition to some unboxing photos, here are some of our continued first impressions:The screen is possibly the best screen we’ve seen on a mobile device. RIM really nailed it with the Bold and 89...

Covet your costly and feature-rich touchscreen phones as you wish but in this day and age, forking over big bucks for a phone just isn’t always the smart way to go. While this may be one of the facts of life, carriers such as Orange are doing their best to deliver feature-rich handsets at low prices. One such device is the newly announced Orange Vegas. Available in both black and pink, the dual-band GPRS touchscreen device features a 2.4-inch display, 1.3 megapixel camera, FM radio, MP3 playback, 128MB ...

Last night T-Mobile held a private launch event for the upcoming Sidekick LX and your pals at BGR just couldn’t stay away. After all, T-Mobile most definitely knows how to throw a party. Amidst a packed house, terrific food and drinks, a handful of arcade games and a great soundtrack, the new Sidekick LX emerged and we got to enjoy some solid face time with the orchid-colored messaging machine. First things first — the display… is… ridiculous. You can stare at “854×480 resolutio...

Not that big of a secret but finally made official at the stroke of midnight, T-Mobile’s Sidekick line-up finally gets a much needed refresh. It’s been covered a bunch before but here are the major selling points (or just random lines of text you can ignore):A stunning 3.2″ 854×480 resolution Sharp F-WVGA screenIntegrated Facebook MySpace and Twitter (finally!)GPS support! Live Search is now GPS-powered, too3.2 megapixel autofocus camera with improved video capabilitiesMicrosoft Exchang...

While there has yet to be a formal announcement of any new handsets, some eagle-eyed observers noticed two new handsets from Kyocera for sale on Virgin Mobile’s website. Being Virgin Mobile phones, they’re not much to write home about but given the current economic climate we’re in, it’s a given that these phones will garner more interest than they would during prosperous times. Starting off with what is nothing more than a Virgin-branded S1300 Melo, the JAX is a plain Jane candybar th...