Iceland’s Largest BitTorrent Tracker Shut Down

Torrent.is, the largest BitTorrent site in Iceland has been taken offline due to efforts from a coalition of anti-piracy organizations. Their request to seize all computer hardware associated with the site was rejected. more

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Who will Microsoft buy next?

A panel of venture capitalists and a Microsoft dealmaker chatted Tuesday about how Microsoft picks the two dozen or so companies it buys each year. more

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MySpace Continues Domination of Facebook

Gian Flugoni of ComScore released some data the company recently presented at the Forrester Consumer Forum that speaks to the ratios of visitor and ad impression shares between MySpace and Facebook. The numbers are interesting, and the implications admittedly difficult to interpret, but the raw numbers come as no big surprise.

MySpace still maintains a clear dominance of the visitor share, with 69% as opposed to Facebook’s 31%. The dominance in advertising is exacerbated by MySpace’s tendency to deliver advertising with a little bit of content to its userbase. The numbers appear crushing to Facebook, in that sense, with roughly 87% going to MySpace and 13% going to Facebook in terms of delivered advertising impressions.

The data was collected in September, so it doesn’t include any new changes to the Facebook or MySpace systems, most notably Facebook’s Beacon or Pages initiatives. Clearly the impact of those will be both difficult to measure and significant, given their infomercial-ish nature.

What is perhaps most interesting is that despite all the interactivity inherent to the Facebook developer program, MySpace visitors still consume an average 1.4 times more pages per visitor than Facebook users.Yesterday, I also posted a very long diatribe that hopefully will cap off my rants against Project Bacn. If you were masochistic enough to read until the end, you probably remember my slamming of Facebook for walling off their garden so very much. Note that MySpace, while it does have fences around their garden, they are very weak white picket fences (to over-extend the metaphor). Their blogs are RSSified, profiles are publicly indexable, and most content on the site is available without the need to log in.

Most of that content also includes ads. In the run down of the ComScore study, they didn’t specify whether or not they measured non-registered visitors to the MySpace site, but I imagine the passive visitor also contributes significantly to the MySpace bottom line. That’s something Facebook, as of present, can’t claim.

That’s the price of erecting a 20-foot concrete wall around your garden. You may keep the riff-raff out, but it is the riff-raff that pays your bills in the end.

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