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News Corp. COO Chase Carey has put executives at MySpace on notice: Get the social network business fixed fast, or else.

"We've been clear that MySpace is a problem," Carey told Wall Street analysts in an earnings call. "The current losses are not acceptable or sustainable."

He says he's optimistic about MySpace's new focus on social entertainment.

Facebook today held a mobile media event, in which it announced, among other things, that it has roughly 200 million active members using its mobile products. Last year, that number was at 65 million. Facebook has some 500 million users in total, and now the company is claiming that its mobile population is bigger than the iPhone or Android user base. Mobile users are twice as active on Facebook as people who are using just PCs, the social networking giant also noted.

On average, response times and availability of five major social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and MySpace) has improved this past quarter, according to Web analytics company AlertSite. This is great news given that all of them (save for possibly MySpace) have a quickly growing number of users.

Despite a few outages, however, Facebook is still the fastest social network in terms of average response time. In the most recent third quarter (July 1 to September 30), Facebook shaved 0.02 seconds off its second quarter average response time, down to 1.00 seconds. Twitter and Myspace came in the last two spots with average response times of 2.93 seconds and 3.61 seconds, respectively. That being said, Twitter's performance improved the most over the last quarter among the social networks studied: more than 35 percent.

Electronic Arts and Facebook today announced they have signed a five-year deal. The strategic relationship aims to create a simplified, more accessible experience for people who play games and purchase virtual goods on Facebook. It also means that Facebook Credits will become the exclusive payment method for the social networking platform in all of EA's games. As part of the agreement, EA will receive a 70 percent revenue share (the standard for all developers on Facebook) for Facebook Credits.

Facebook  has updated its ability to store high resolution photos and made improvements to viewing, bulk tagging, and uploading images. The photo quality improvements should be available for some people today, with the other new features rolling out over the next month.

The improvements mean users can soon upload higher resolution images: up to 2048 pixels on the largest edge (for those keeping count, that's about 3.1MP, or enough to print out a 5x7 print at 300 DPI), compared to the previous 720 pixels limit. The site is also planning to launch a faster and smoother new photo viewer that opens over the main Facebook page. It allows users to browse whole albums without having to jump to a new page, reducing the number of page refreshes needed. The new Flash-based uploader, meanwhile, will let users tag multiple photos in the same album all at once (no, this isn't face recognition technology), as well as tag photos of the same person with a lot less effort.
To promote the Photos app enhancement coming this month, Facebook has included some higher resolution photos from National Geographic and Sports Illustrated. They look pretty darn good!

By Emil Protalinski, TechSpot.com

Facebook and Skype are working on a deal that would integrate Facebook Connect with Skype accounts, AllThingsD has learned, citing sources familiar with the situation.
ATD has managed to get a hold of a screenshot showing the new features in action. Once you connect Skype with Facebook, you’ll be able to SMS, chat with or call your Facebook friends directly from Skype. You should also be able to log in to Skype with your Facebook credentials.


The new features should go live on Skype 5.0 when the new version goes out of beta in a couple of weeks.It’s a logical step for both companies. Facebook’s chat capabilities are somewhat limited compared toGoogle Talk, which is deeply integrated with Gmail, and offers voice and video chat capabilities. Enabling new ways to communicate with your Facebook friends is definitely one of Facebook’s goals. Skype, on the other hand, will be very happy to extend its user base to Facebook’s 500+ million users.

If the story turns out to be true, it will be interesting to see whether Facebook will also integrate Skype features into its web interface, or perhaps its mobile application.