I am really excited to be going to the Youth Privacy Online Conference in September. Specifically, I am looking forward to hearing from speakers: Dr. Ann Cavoukian, Dr. Valerie Steeves (because we know how I disagree), Chris Kelly (Privacy Officer, Facebook) and Bruce Cowper (Microsoft). It’s a jam-packed day but it looks to be a good one!

Okay, so I guess Myspace is not dead afterall. Sneaky devil had a trick up their sleeve last week when they announced Open Social with Google.

Here’s an interesting blog article by Marc Andreessen (co-founder of Ning).  He has some screengrabs of integration and gets into some more detail about the concept of Open Social and the implications of something of this magnetude for developers: “I think any web site going forward that wants maximum distribution across the largest number of users will have a single back-end, and then multiple sets of front-end pages.” I guess that’s nothing new if you’re developing your sites for WAP or Facebook already. Just add another to the list…right?

I’m excited to see this play out and curious on how Google and its crew are going to handle privacy.

Myspace may still have the majority of social networking users in the United States but over the last year Facebook has been showing outstanding growth in Canada, Australia and the U.K. I imagine this is raising some eyebrows down at the Myspace camp. Someone asked me recently ‘would you move over from Facebook to Myspace and if you so, what would incent you?’ At the time, I said, I might move over to promote my songs as a singer-songwriter because I think Myspace does that application well.

One of the things I love about Myspace is that it has been so musician friendly…unless of course you remember that bout between Billy Bragg and Myspace last year re: their terms of service. But regardless, Myspace has been a quick and dirty way for musicians to upload and promote their music.

But Myspace is in trouble, if you ask me. Facebook is about to launch a new feature to allow members to create pages for their bands and promote their music and gigs. My prediction is, that if Facebook does this well enough – it will be extremely damaging to Myspace. Judging on how fast Facebook is to adapt and change its interface based on community input – Myspace may not recover.

Facebook will definitely have to make sure that their Terms of Service are fair. (I can only imagine the legal work on this app…) But if they can help independent artists with real tools so that they can try to be successful at what they do, then it may be time for Myspace to shift gears and focus on their success in video instead.