Why I Now Use Facebook

You knew that when Rupert bought MySpace he wouldn't be content with their umpteen revenue streams and would seek to make bank off of people's profiles.

MySpace, the world's largest social networking site and work procrastination tool, will finally start capitalizing on all that personal information its users have been innocently (or, as is the case with many profile photos, not-so-innocently) putting into their profiles.

The New York Times reports that executives at Fox Interactive Media, the New Corporation unit that owns MySpace, have been tinkering for about six months with technology that can tailor ads to the personal information of its 110 million active users.

The company plans to unveil its "completely new paradigm" of online advertising to investors today.

"We are blessed with a phenomenal amount of information about the likes, dislikes and life's passions of our users," said Peter Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive Media.

Of course, privacy advocates are miffed that these stated life's passions are being used to sell stuff to the passionate folks who naively entered the information without knowing what it would be used for.

"Miffed"? I'd say a little more. There's not even an opt-out for this that I can see. In Rupert's world we're all supposed to be good little consumers while he gets rich off our likes and dislikes. Some would say that the problem is commidifying these Web 2.0 sites necessarily forces you to break that trust with the user. Of course, MySpace was already raking in $40 million a month before this change. Not buying it. Selling people's personal information to make a buck goes too far. MySpace is kind of yesterday's hangout, anyway.

The Kids Are Alright

We've seen a couple polls lately about how the youth vote is breaking strongly Democratic, but aside from the brand loyalty implications, this is important because young people these days are the most committed volunteers in America, whether for nonprofit charities or political campaigns. The biggest issue Republicans are going to have with the malaise in their party is the waning of their army of volunteers. If they go ahead and nominate Rudy Giuliani, this will be even worse, considering their army usually consists of a lot of religious conservatives.

So young people enrich the Democratic Party in a myriad of ways, not only through voting but through volunteerism and energy. And the Republicans are completely out of touch with this; otherwise, they wouldn't seek to boycott the YouTube debate, a major venue for 18-29 year-olds. And one of their top political leaders would have a clue what he's talking about.

But Romney showed some unfamiliarity with the Internet when he discussed the problem of sexual predators and children.

"YouTube is a website that allows kids to network with one another and make friends and contact each other," Romney explained. "YouTube looked to see if they had any convicted sex offenders on their web site. They had 29,000."

Actually, YouTube is the popular site that allows Internet users to upload and watch a variety of videos. The web site, which is owned by search-engine behemoth Google, also was a co-sponsor of the Democratic presidential debate held on Monday night.

The web site MySpace is the one to which Romney actually was referring. MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., said this week it had found 29,000 registered sex offenders who had submitted profiles to its site and removed them.

You'd think Rupert would have briefed him.

Republicans are taking the youth vote for granted, much like they have the black vote and (increasingly) the Hispanic vote. This doesn't allow many ways left to win.