Even while parent company News Corp continues to try to disrupt the Microsoft/Yahoo merger, Fox Interactive Media (FIM) is rumored to be in negotiations with Microsoft take Google’s place as the MySpace advertising partner.

The Google-FIM deal, first announced in August 2006, obligated Google to make guaranteed minimum revenue share payments to FIM of at least $900 million based on Fox achieving certain traffic and other commitments. The original deal was negotiated in extreme haste, say people with knowledge of the deal. In February 2007 the parties were rumored to be working on the final agreement, months after ads were already being served by Google.

In Google’s haste to keep the deal from Microsoft they may have paid more than they can stomach.

According to our source, Sergey Brin’s thinly veiled buyer’s remorse verbalized during Google’s most recent earnings call on January 31 angered News Corp./FIM execs.

We don’t talk about individual partners’ performance or anything like that. Now I do want to highlight though, we have had a challenge in Q4 with social networking inventory as a whole and some of the monetization work we were doing there didn’t pan out as well as we had hoped. But we are continuing the efforts and we are still optimistic about future quarters.

…we have a huge amount of social networking inventory, including the MySpace relationship, including of course Orkut, our own network, which is very, very successful and probably like 20 others, or something like that. I don’t know the exact number. But we have an incredible amount of this inventory and in fact, it varies quite a bit in how it all monetizes, based on a number of factors, some of which we understand, some of which we don’t.

…I don’t think we have the killer best way to advertise and monetize the social networks yet. We’re running lots of experiments. We had some significant improvements but as I said, some of the things we were working on in Q4 didn’t really pan out and there were some disappointments there. I hope to be able to report more progress in the future but it’s a big opportunity because it’s so much inventory.

The vast majority of social network traffic that Google serves ads into is controlled by MySpace - this was a direct complaint about that deal. Shortly thereafter, our source says, FIM started discussions with Microsoft about taking over the advertising inventory. Microsoft announced a guaranteed payments deal with Facebook just two weeks after the initial FIM/Google deal. I’m sure they’d be very happy to get their hands on MySpace traffic, too. And if anyone has more money to burn than Google, it’s Microsoft.

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RSS reader Bloglines has suffered a major outage over the weekend with the service simply ceasing to update any blogs from just before midnight PST February 24.

Threads on the Bloglines forum suggest that the issue is widespread and to date no statement has been issued by Bloglines or IAC/ Ask staff in relation to the issue. A test at 11pm PST shows the most recent stories indexed by Bloglines are over 15 hours old.

Bloglines users are not happy with the outage, with some already signing up for other services, and other comments including such as “Remember when they at least showed the plumber?”

One commenter claims that Bloglines may be about to be shut down:

A buddy who works at ask.com (owners of Bloglines) says that they are discontinuing the service because it makes no money and there will be an announcement tomorrow.

Given the continued feature releases from Bloglines in the last six months it would be a little strange for them to be shut now, but certainly an outage of this size, without response, won’t give those still using Bloglines a lot of faith in the service going forward.

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Brisbane, California based Glam Media reported an $85 million round of financing, their fourth, today. We first reported that Glam was looking to raise as much as $200 million in August 2007. More rumors popped up in November 2007.

The round was $65 million in cash and $20 million in debt, on top of almost $30 million they raised in three prior rounds. Investors included Hubert Burda Media, GLG Partners, Duff Ackerman & Goodrich and Hercules Technology Growth Capital. The valuation, as expected, was in the half billion dollar range.

The company, according to their original offering document, which is embedded below, is not yet profitable. They lost around $3.7 million on $21 million in revenue in 2007. 2008 projected revenues are $150 million and $40 million in profit.

Glam operates a number of small sites geared towards women (including that appear to be pure SEO plays like free-beauty-tips.com, celebrity-hairstyles.org and others). They also sell advertisements for other sites, which make up the vast bulk of its page views. We have criticized them in the past for claiming to be the largest womens site on the Internet, and the fastest growing site in the U.S., based on traffic coming from sites they sell ads for.

As an ad network Glam may find its margins squeezed as competition increases.

Glam Media Teaser August 2007

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Social voting outfit Mixx has taken $2 million Series B in a round led by existing investor InterSouth Partners.

Mixx offers a category based social voting service that competes with sites such as Digg, Reddit and Propeller. McLean, Virginia based Mixx was launched in September 2007 with talent including former executives from Yahoo!, AOL, USA TODAY and The Associated Press. The company has regularly launched new features in an attempt to stand out in a market place with strongly entrenched loyalties to existing players.

Mixx added the LA Times to its investor group in December. Total funding to date is $3.5 million.

(via VentureBeat)

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Semantic Web startup Radar Networks raised $13 million in a B round, led by Velocity Interactive Group. Velocity’s Ross Levinsohn will join the board. Other investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital. The company previously raised $5 million from Vulcan, Leapfrog Ventures, Ron Conway, and Peter Rip.

Radar Networks is the company behind Twine, a site in private beta that helps you organize the Web and your personal information by automatically tagging and cataloging everything you save to it. (For more, see our write-up).

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Six months after Facebook came out with a version of its social network for the iPhone, LinkedIn is finally coming around to releasing a mobile version of its own.

It is live now. Just go to http://m.linkedin.com/ on any mobile browser. Of course, if you have an iPhone, you will see a version optimized just for that device.

This isn’t exactly what we had in mind when we noted there is still an opportunity to create a kick-ass mobile social network.

But the basic functionality is all there. You can look up people’’s profiles, invite people into your network, and see updates from your contacts. More fully-featured, downloadable mobile apps geared to specific phones may be coming in the future.

Even limited mobile browser accessibility should help LinkedIn keep its members happy. The regular Website has been on a tear lately, nearly tripling in unique visitors over the past year in the U.S., to 3.6 million in January 2008, according to comScore.

No signs of social networking fatigue there.

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Today, in conjunction with the 1.0 release of Adobe Air, the digital labs of the New York Times Co. is releasing an application in public beta called ShifD. An early version of the app won a Yahoo Hack Day last June. It is designed to let users easily shift notes, links, and addresses between their computers and their mobile phones.

Instead of e-mailing yourself notes to remind yourself to do something or links to stories you want to read, you put them into ShifD and create a feed that is automatically available on your mobile phone. You can use a standalone Adobe Air app on your desktop or a regular Web browser. On your mobile phone, ShifD supports most mobile Web browsers, and is also offering customized versions for the iPhone and the Blackberry. You can enter notes back into your SHifD account from you mobile phone by texting to “SHIFD”.

It seems like a lot of extra effort just to sync a limited number of things between your computer and your phone. There are more comprehensive syncing options out there, and it is not too hard to access a regular bookmarking service, such as del.icio.us, from your mobile phone (see mobilicio.us). As for addresses, Google Maps and Yahoo Maps, both have mobile options as well. So there is nothing new that ShifD allows you to do. But it does tie those three use case (notes, links, and places) together in an elegant way. It makes a lot more sense for people with less capable phones. Otherwise, I’d argue that e-mailing yourself such reminders and links to your Blackberry or iPhone—or tapping into the mobile versions of existing services you already use—is probably more efficient. Those of you who decide to try it out, tell us what you think in comments.

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It’s time for an update on the personalized homepage wars - Netvibes and Pageflakes tend to get most of the press attention, and they are certainly pushing the envelope and trying to find new ways to make their services useful to users. But those two services have less than 4% of the market for personalized homepages between them (I have emailed both companies to see if their internal stats match what we have below).

About a year ago I posted the visitor stats for the big players in this space - MyYahoo, iGoogle, MyMSN and MyAOL/MyNetscape. All of these services provide a drag and drop interface that allows users to put whatever content they like on their home page, through specialized modules or via RSS feeds. Most of them support third party widgets as well. At that time, Yahoo had significantly more visitors than all of the other services combined - 70% of the 72 million or so visitors to all of the sites combined. At the time, Netvibes and Pageflakes were not large enough to be tracked by Comscore. Now they are.

Based on January 2008 Comscore stats, Yahoo still leads the category, although they’ve dipped about 6% to 47 million monthly visitors. Their market share has dropped to 57%. Google, on the strength of homepage promotion of iGoogle, has tripled to 22 million monthly visitors, putting them in second place with 26% market share. MyMSN and MyAOL/MyNetscape are next, with 10% and 3.3% market share, respectively. Then, at the end, Netvibes and Pageflakes.

Not on the chart is GlobalGrind, a hip-hop centric personalized home page that launched in September 2007. They now have 144,000 monthly unique visitors of their own. Not bad for a site that’s less than six months old.

A total of $20 million or so in venture capital has gone into Pageflakes and Netvibes. But without a major portal or search engine to feed them new users, growth is going to continue to be hard v. the big guys. And since all the big portals already have their own products, they won’t be looking to acquire these startups unless they get a lot of users on their site. It’s going to be a long haul.

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Today, yet another blog directory launches. Blogged has blog ratings and reviews in many categories, including technology, entertainment, business, sports, culture, and politics. Its own staff rates and reviews the top blogs, and that is combined with reader ratings and reviews, similar to how Yelp combines staff and user reviews of restaurants and stores. (After a blog gets more than 10 user reviews, the user ratings override the editor’s rating). For instance, here are the top blogs in technology (TechCrunch is No. 2), and here are the top blogs in crafts (Angry Chicken is No. 2). Blogs are ranked both based on number of votes and reviews.

It is a decent enough directory if you need a starting point from which to explore the myriad and confusing world of blogs, and the site gets points for a clean, efficient design. But it does not offer anything you cannot already find at more established services including Technorati, Google blog search, Bloglines, or MyBlogLog.

You cannot even search for posts about a particular topic. Blogged only returns entire blogs as search results. to be fair, it is not trying to compete with Technorati or Google Blog search as a place to help you find the latest posts about a hot topic. Rather, it is aiming more to be a place where people go to discover new blogs. But even Technorati already does a pretty good job on that level. And reader voting is also nothing new. Technorati allows users to sign up and vote for their “faves,” as does Yahoo’s MyBlogLog. If Blogged can figure out how to attract the most informed blog reviewers and somehow keep itself from being gamed by spam votes, it could become a useful filter for people trying to sort through the blogosphere. But there is no shortage of blog directories, and competition is stiff.

The site is self-funded by founders Kenneth Yeh and Gladys Kong, who until recently were employees at Snap.com.

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YouTube disappeared from the internet for between 1-2 hours today, according to reader reports and others.

YouTube went down around 11:30am PST and came back some time later.

The interesting side of the outage is an allegation from OpenDNS that Pakistan Telecom hijacked YouTube’s IP address space resulting in a worldwide outage. They note that the issue was subsequently rectified by PCCW, but it raises the question: is it really that easy to take one of the largest destinations online down?

There is no official word from YouTube as yet on the cause of the downtime.

(thanks to Mauricio Idarraga for the tip)

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