This appears to be the end of the mirror shot. Myspace has just been sold to Specific Media, an advertising network for $35 million. $35 million doesn’t sound too bad until you remember that News Corp. purchased the company for $580 million in 2005. Ouch.

Satirizing social media has quickly become a shopworn cliche, but Dallas-Fort Worth’s Fox 4 has posted a brilliant example that sums up the subject perfectly. Anchor Clarice Tinsley begins her “report” on a shooting at City Hall by tossing to reporter Matt Grubs, who’s “live on the scene, tweeting details to his 87 followers.”

The piece goes on to lampoon Facebook, FourSquare, Skype, and something called MySpace (???), while also satirizing the dinosaur media’s often-clunky attempts to integrate the buzzy platforms. (H/T The Political Carnival)

So! Ping launched earlier this week, and more than a million people have signed up. I’m not one of them. I use iTunes for downloading music but I always decline when prompted to update this or that new version. As described by the AFP, Ping “allows users to view photos and videos of their favorite [...]

When looking ahead at the next year, pundits turn into prognosticators. Bloggers covering all sorts of topics and industries are now giving their predictions for what’s to come in 2010. Conventional wisdom says to go the conservative route with these choices in order to avoid looking foolish when none of your projections pan out. At the same time, there’s a key difference between picking things that are realistically possible and those that are already on the road to happening. I’ve assembled my favorite predictions covering a variety of fields and what’s supposedly in store for the near future:

The Financial Times recently wrote about News Corp and MySpace, and describe a strange tactical decision regarding a social media program, saying “that News Corp. dragged its feet over implementing Ajax, a program that allows users to send a message, an e-mail or to post a comment on their friends’ pages without having to open a new browser window.” Yeah, no it isn’t.

By 2005, it was time for Rupert Murdoch to “get serious” about the internet. Or so starts the engaging Financial Times profile of the wilting social network MySpace, which New Corporation acquired that summer. Kids, Murdoch noticed, were “watching less television and reading fewer newspapers,” and the most fertile ground was online. Well-intentioned, but then things crumbled.

This morning, TechCrunch stumbled across a time capsule: a brand-new video promoting Friendster, touting its upgrade that, it appears, makes it function like the MySpace of eight years ago. They miss, though, the Secret Hidden Message™ of the video. That being: Asians only, please.

Congrats to the New York Yankees, who clinched their 27th World Series last night by defeating the Philadelphia Phillies by a score of 7 to 3. The Yankees’ dominance of Major League Baseball is the stuff of legends. But let’s look at their success in a way that is relevant to our media coverage: let’s compare the payroll differential between the Yankees and the Phillies as if they were media outlets. Fair? Balanced? I think so!

If you’ve seen Funny People — or read tech blogs — you know about the MySpace scene, where Adam Sandler‘s bigshot comedian character is hired to do standup at a big MySpace event (for a whopping $300, 000 — probably not a Rupert-friendly sum these days). Seth Rogen is his sidekick, an aspiring comedian whom Sandler taps first to write him jokes, then to be his BFF. Together they mock MySpace, like wondering what would happen if Tom from MySpace and Craig from Craigslist got in a fight. MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson even makes an appearance, asking Sandler: “Do you actually use MySpace?” Says Sandler: “I fuck girls, Tom. I don’t have time for that.” Zing