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Owen Van Natta, who was earlier a senior executive with Facebook, has now been confirmed as the new CEO of the social networking site MySpace. This has happened after the departure of MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe. News Corporation, which is MySpace’s parent company, has stated that Owen Van Natta took over from DeWolfe this Saturday.

This restructure was kick-started by Jonathan Miller who was earlier recruited by Rupert Murdoch as the chief digital officer for News Corporation. Miller has stated that Owen Van Natta has a very deep and thorough understanding of social networking sites. He also stated that Owen would help to guide MySpace through its next phase of growth.

Van Natta has also worked for Amazon and Playlist. He also played a big part in negotiating Microsoft’s 240 million dollar investment in Facebook. MySpace is facing stiff competition from Facebook, despite it being the world’s most commercially successful social networking site.

The talks about Owen’s recruitment with MySpace started surfacing as early as September 2008 when he was short listed to govern MySpace Music. He was Facebook’s chief operating officer from 2005 onwards but was sidelined later on to be their chief revenue officer. Following this Owen Van Natta left Facebook in August 2007.

The Yahoo! Xtra enterprise is showing its courage, moving from a loss of $3.32 million in 2007 to a profit of $1.58 million in December 2008. Their revenue grew from $5.63 million in 2007 to $8.2 million in 2008. Also, during the same period, their expenses fell from $9.1 million to $7.1 million.

Kevin Bowler, CEO of Yahoo! Xtra said that there were plenty of start-up costs in the first year which also included marketing. However in the second year, there was a strong growth in revenue. He also said that Yahoo! Xtra has been benefiting from the online advertising move in line with the answer from Internet Advertising Bureau.

The bureau noticed a growth of 43% in online advertising in New Zealand between 2007 and 2008. Bowler also said that he is optimistic and the IAB numbers that are due in May will see the entire market lift again.

As of 2009 Yahoo! Xtra’s prospect, Bowler said that the company does not like to make any public forecasts. However, he does not see any signs of downturn. In December 2006, the Yahoo! Xtra firm was announced, where the telecom holds about 49% of the company. Australia’s Yahoo!7 is a joint venture between Seven Networks and Yahoo! of the US wherein Seven Network holds 51%.

Due to the growing popularity of mobile internet access, wherein several users search for content on their mobile phones, it has encouraged Gomez Inc and dotMobi to create the world’s initial mobile web benchmark sequence in order to rank the top mobile sites on the basis of their effectiveness for customer operations.

The mobile search benchmark is a way to rank mobile search providers on five different criteria. These criterions are readiness, availability, response time, discoverability and the consistency in search operations carried out using a mobile handset. In this survey, only the better-known and larger service providers are considered. The selection of service providers was based on an expanded search query report conducted by comScore and published in July 2008.

For this survey, nine companies were selected which include Yahoo!, Google, Ask, AOL, Amazon, MSN, Craigslist, eBay and MySpace. In this survey, Facebook was not included as their mobile web applications failed to meet the desired technical requirements of this study.

To ensure a consistent playing field for the participants, a fixed task was set out along with a predetermined set of steps that were supposed to be used at the time of performing search operations on every participating provider.

Online users expressed their opinions to the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), when a recent survey illustrated that the online users are happy to get online advertising as long as the ads deliver relevant content. Nearly 2,000 online users were surveyed and among them 37 per cent said that they would like to receive online advertisements if appropriate products are displayed in which they are interested.

28 percent of the respondents confessed that, the promise of free content was sufficient to arouse their curiosity in internet advertising campaigns. Internet users warned that the advertisers should provide them with relevant content that they are interested in. One out of three members of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook were annoyed by the regular spamming requests that they receive to join groups in which they have no interest.

IAB social media council head, Amy Kean, cautioned the advertisers to be careful while using digital media such as networking sites. Despite its popularity, the study illustrates that respect for users is as important as that of social media. Consumers will never respond to SPAM or inappropriate advertising.

Social network users are aware of online advertising which is a source of revenue. An awesome 97 per cent of users voted in support of advertising on social media sites despite of the fact that they were charged with a membership fee.

Oprah Winfrey needs no introduction. Her popularity continues to grow. According to Hitwise, an analyst firm, Winfrey’s first tweet has tremendously booted Twitter’s web traffic. It substantially rose by 43% in that particular week.

Winfrey posted her first tweet on 17th April. Subsequently, Twitter has registered a staggering 37% of new visitors. Moreover, Twitter’s share of US internet visits rose by 24%. Twitter is a relatively new internet service compared to its counterparts. It is commendable the way it is amassing new visitors. Hitwise also pointed out that Facebook only managed to entice 8% of new visitors in March.

Hiwise made some other revelations as well. It claimed that ‘Oprah twitter’ was the most used search term last week and it was ranked at the 35th position. It is definitely an impressive figure considering the fact that the search data is recorded weekly and the show was only put up on Friday.

American actor Ashton Kutcher has already created history. He managed to have over 1 million followers and hit headlines with his milestone victory. More and more celebrities and public figures are turning to twitter for various reasons. Some use the micro blogging service as a platform to voice their opinions; some use it to generate awareness, while some are simply addicted to it. It will indeed be very interesting to see Oprah Winfrey’s fan following online.