News Of The Day 11/18/2010

MySpace and Facebook friend each other, and . . . oh you know that's the main story, but there's plenty else to keep up on!

Economics/Geekonomics:
MERS is going to be investigated. A look at the whole mess behind the loan system . . . company . . . thing. This could be a shallow nothing, or it could yield a lot of info on the whole mess, so stay tuned.

Matt Stoller discusses how we've gone from sharecropping to debtcropping, noting how the debt treadmill is messing up our society and economy . . . further. Some thought provoking stuff here.

Comics:
The casting for the Superman film begins. Also a good point is made in this article that post Potter, Warner will probably want more big hits and has a lot of properties at its fingertips . . .

Publishing:
Mega-Big econo-political magazine The Economist comes out for the iPad. That is big news because the Economist is an insanely popular magazine, and how it succeeds or fails at this is going to be watched.

Social Media:
Facebook and MySpace are going to get integrated with SOME data, which is causing people to figure it's over for MySpace. The MySpace CEO says otherwise. One thing I can guarantee – speculation is gonna be rampant.

Also Facebook further makes a move against Google with the option to make Facebook your homepage.

Technology:
Either this is utterly brilliant or going to prove to be stupid – but I like it. Plastic Jungle raises $10 million for its gift card exchange business. Thats a nice amount of money, but what a great business idea – because really, how many times to gift cards sit and not get used?

Marketo gets $25 million. They're a northern-Silicon Valley company that does management of email marketing and lead generation, and seem to be doing pretty good. Might be resume worthy.

Video Games:
There's now a cross-mobile platform MMO.

And there they are! OnLive to launch its Microconsole so they're not bound to the computer. At $99 that's a pretty nice deal, smart bit of marketing. I haven't dug up much on OnLive that says people think it's changing the world, but this may help . . .

QUESTION OF THE DAY: Avoiding the MySpace/Facebook discussion, what do you think the next big "cooperative" effort in Social Media is?

– Steven Savage