T-Mobile‘s line of Sidekick mobile devices is growing up.

What was once a device geared toward texting teens is getting some grown-up functions as T-Mobile unveils the new Sidekick LX. (more…)

MySpace has introduced a new image search feature to its integrated search engine, allowing users to quickly search through photos shared by their friends and the MySpace community. While MySpace did not officially announce the new feature, the company has confirmed that it recently went live, and indexes around 3 billion of the site’s photos. The addition reflects MySpace’s apparently increasing focus on its search engine, which also includes the site’s video and music content along with a Google-powered web search. (more…)

Responding to a subpoena from Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, MySpace today is handing over the names of 90,000 registered sex offenders who have been identified and blocked from the social networking site over the past two years. (more…)

MySpace has won a $234m (£120m) legal judgement over junk messages sent to members of the social networking site.

Victory in the case was awarded to MySpace after Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines, the men behind the junk mail, failed to show up in court.

The judgement is thought to be the largest ever given against senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail.

However, anti-spam experts said MySpace had little chance of getting the cash it sought.

Damage call

“Anybody who’s been thinking about engaging in spam are going to say ‘Wow, I better not go there,’” said Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace chief security officer to AP.

“Spammers don’t want to be prosecuted. They are there to make money. It’s our job to send a message to stop them,” he added.

The two junk mailers worked together to create MySpace accounts or took over existing ones by stealing passwords.

Using these accounts the pair e-mailed MySpace members to make the mail look like it came from trusted friends. Typically the e-mail asked recipients to view a video or visit a website.

“When you go there, they were making money trying to sell you something or making money based on hits or trying to sell ringtones,” said Mr Nigam.

MySpace said the duo sent 735,925 messages to its members.

In court papers, MySpace said sending the junk mail cost it money and generated complaints from hundreds of users. MySpace also said that some of the external websites contained pornographic material, potentially harming teenagers who use MySpace.

Under the 2003 US CAN Spam law, each violation entitles MySpace to $100 (£50) in damages, tripled when spam is sent “wilfully and knowingly”.

In its legal case MySpace sought $157.4m from Mr Wallace and Mr Rines under CAN Spam plus a further $63.4m separately from Mr Rines under the same law. MySpace sought another $3m from the pair under a different section of CAN-Spam. It also sought $1.5m under California’s anti-phishing laws and reimbursement for the $4.7m it spent on legal fees.

US District Judge Audrey B Collins in Los Angeles granted every one of MySpace’s claim for damages.

But John Levine of the anti-spam advocacy group Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email believes MySpace will have a tough job collecting the money.

“The giant judgements are all defaults, which means they don’t necessarily even know how to find the spammer.”

The judge also issued injunctions against Mr Wallace and Mr Rines barring similar activities in the future.

MySpace is pursuing another anti-spam case against a person it claims gained access to profiles using stolen passwords and then sent spam bulletins from those accounts.

BBC

As expected, Google has unveiled a preview of Friend Connect, a way to add social features to a Web site without programming.

David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, described Friend Connect, whose site is inaccessible Monday morning, as plumbing for the rest of the Web.

“The Web is getting better by getting more social. We’ve baked social features into the infrastructure of the Web, and it is not tied to any particular site,” Glazer said. “Users can interact with any of their friends anywhere they go on Web, and with any app.”

I asked Glazer if Friend Connect is a response to Facebook Connect and MySpace.com’s Data Availability. “People will speculate a lot in that direction. We didn’t create this code in the three days (since Facebook and MySpace made their announcements).”

Unlike Facebook and MySpace, Google lacks a dominant, centralized social-networking hub. Friend Connect works the edges of the Internet, applying an open and distributed approach, and bringing a social dimension to the 99-plus percent of sites that aren’t socially enabled.

“The distributed model has worked well for the Web. That is what the Web does–many points of light loosely coupled and massively distributed, allowing users to connect to pages of information,” Glazer told me. “Now it is working to connect people to other people.”

Friend Connect-compliant sites will be able to view, invite, and interact with newfound friends, or with existing friends, from established social-networking sites, including Facebook, Google Talk, Hi5, Orkut, and Plaxo via secure authorization application-programming interfaces.

Currently only a few sample sites, including Google’s Guacamole site, are available to end users. “We are looking to get feedback from Web site owners about what kinds of sites and apps they want,” Glazer said. Ingrid Michaelson, an independent musician, integrates iLike’s OpenSocial application with Friend Connect to connect friends without having to leave the site.

 John McCrea, vice president of marketing at Plaxo, said Google’s Friend Connect is “flipping the model” from walled gardens (such as Facebook) to a more open social Web:

Instead of widgetizing apps and bolting them on to some corporation’s proprietary social graph, why not widgetize the social graph and socially enable any Web site or Web page?

That’s a big, bold vision that Plaxo is 100 percent aligned with. As to Facebook and MySpace, it is certainly great to read the rhetoric they are now putting forth. The meme of data portability, open social Web, and bill of rights for users of the social Web has certainly caught on!

Alas, the devil is in the details, and we haven’t seen any details (yet) from Facebook–just a Friday blog post signaling intent. It might be great, and we hope it is, but it’s not clear what the actual substance will be.

With regard to MySpace, the rhetoric is over-the-top goodness, including a declaration of the end of the era of walled gardens. Alas, the details, as they currently exist, for their “Data Availability” effort fall far short of the vision many of us share for users having ownership of their data, control over who can see it, and freedom to take it with them, wherever they go across the social Web.

In the MySpace “Data Availability” model, the user can take their data for a walk anytime they want or to any place they want, but the data remains on a tether. There is no notion of copy, move, or sync. Participating sites must agree to have MySpace serve the data live in their page. That’s a half-step wrapped in a beautiful flag of openness.

“Friend Connect provides wizardlike pages. Webmasters just fill in the information, select social apps, copy code, paste, and save. No coding is required. It passes the ‘easy’ test, and it does something useful,” Glazer said. It provides features such as user registration, invitations, member galleries, message posting, and reviews, as well as OpenSocial applications.

At the core of Friend Connect are three emerging social standards–OpenID, oAuth, and OpenSocial.

“Today is the right time to connect all emerging standards to give users the ability to go anywhere on Web and interact with any set of friends on any application,” Glazer said.

Google’s Social Graph API is not part of the Friend Connect preview, Glazer said. “The Social Graph API is part of the same conversation, but we didn’t need to connect those two dots.”

Glazer emphasized that Google is focused on keeping users in control of their information. “The Webmaster has no business knowing who my friends are, but I can choose to link my login to my Facebook account and invite friends,” he said. “It’s up to each site to publish APIs, with appropriate terms of use,” Glazer told me. “I would expect as Friend Connect matures in the market, we will see more people connecting to it and more standard interfaces to turn on and register for it. It’s not fully standard now.

Friend Connect covers many of the use cases for the social Web, but a single, standard “friend” API is still lacking.

“There are a few good candidates, such as the OpenSocial RESTful APIs, which are at a rough consensus stage but not running code,” Glazer said. “We don’t know enough to call a winner, but there will be a standard.”

CNET news.com