MySpace to Get Own Phone Network
Egads, MySpace continues to rot the popular culture. Soon you will be able to update the world’s worst looking websites with a really bad cellphone! Yipee! From the AP Here:
NEW YORK – The social networking site MySpace, hugely successful among teenagers and twenty-somethings, is about to become more ubiquitous with the launch of a cellular service that will let users read and post to the site for free.
The service and two accompanying phones will be launched in a few months by Helio LLC, a joint venture of Internet service provider Earthlink Inc. and South Korean carrier SK Telecom Co.
On MySpace, users keep personal pages with journals, communicate with friends and play games. It’s a formula that has attracted more than 54 million users and the attention of media conglomerate News Corp., which bought the site last year for $580 million.
This essentially means that Fox News paid over 10 bucks a piece for each shitty web site on MySpace. So now matter how horrifying your web authoring skills are, and no matter what crazy color scheme or background image you use, or what crappy band whose video you stream on your stupid MySpace Page, congrats, your site is worth over 10 Bucks.
“We’re able to leverage a lot of that experience about how to take social networking and put it on a device,” said Sky Dayton, founder of Earthlink and chief executive of Helio.
“What our target really cares about, this young consumer, is being connected to their friends and being connected to their world,” Dayton said, contrasting Helio’s idea to that of the major carriers, who are expanding sales of music, videos and games.
Newsflash for NewsCorp! Young Consumers? They mostly consume Internet bandwidth. Most MySpace users don’t have high paying jobs, or they still live at home. Any cellphone service you try to make will have to be bought by Mom and Dad.
Helio’s two phones, dubbed “Hero” and “Kickflip” will be based on Korean designs. Made by Pantech and VK Mobile, the phones will feature large color screens and cameras, but no QWERTY keyboards.
Helio will be a so-called “mobile virtual network operator,” meaning it won’t have its own cellular network. Instead, it will buy access to Sprint Nextel Corp.’s and Verizon Wireless’ high-speed networks.
I want a cell phone that will beep at me when someone who has a MySpace account gets within arm’s reach of me. That way I can smack that person upside the back of the head and tell them that MySpace is a waste of WebSpace. I would pay $19.99 per month for THAT service!
