MySpace Getting A Little Less Chaotic?

Interesting blog post by MySpace co-founder and president Tom Anderson this morning. He’s proposing a new default layout for MySpace pages that has significantly better organization of user information, and moves from a two column to three column approach.

So we’ve been working on a new home page design here. Thinking of launching this in a few weeks, but I wanted to see what people thought about. Take a look and tell me what you think

The page certainly has more of a Facebook look and feel than the existing default theme, with clearly delineated content areas and modules, and a new horizontal navigation bar across the top.

Unlike Facebook, MySpace allows users to customize the CSS of their profiles. If you really don’t want to leave MySpace but love the clean lines of Facebook, there are templates to customize MySpace to look just like Facebook.

MyProgress Lets You Track Your Progress

Vancouver based MyProgress offers a service that provides progress monitoring features (generally used in computer role playing games) for life tracking.

MyProgress allows users to track their personal finances, skills, “knowledges”, wealth and health dynamics.

The site tracks every piece of information users enter, from a new purchase, capital gains, an hour of photographic or driving experience, or a rental price change, and provides a detailed overview on how fast they are progressing in comparison with the others across multiple categories, such as age, occupation, and location. The service provides analytics about user’s life and build forecasts based on past data.

MyProgress is billed as the world’s first online application “designed to helping an individual [not a corporate] manage their progress and read their life log as an RSS feed.”

eBuddy Adds MySpace Instant Messaging

European web chat startup eBuddy, which is in a fight-to-the-death struggle with Silicon Valley based Meebo, just added support for MySpace instant messaging tor their product.

eBuddy now supports MySpace IM, AOL, ICQ, GoogleTalk, MSN and Yahoo. Log in to some of all of these services from the eBuddy home page.

MySpace says they now have over 18.5 million users of the service, which soft launched in September 2006. By comparison, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AIM have 224 million, 93 million, 30 million and 30 million users, respectively (Comscore worldwide - July 2007). GTalk trails the rest, with just 4.8 million users.

Rumor is that Trillian, a downloadable piece of software that also accesses all major IM networks except Skype, will be adding MySpace support soon, too.

MyHeritage Expands Its Family Tree

Genealogy site MyHeritage is merging with Pearl Street Software. Through the team-up MyHeritage will pick up Pearl Street’s VP of Technology and gain control of the #2 family tree software in worldwide sales (Family Tree Legends), the #2 family tree submission site (GenCircles) with more than 160 million ancestors, and more than 400 million public records in the Family Tree Legends Records Collection.

The addition of the team and products put the company in a better position to deal with upstart Geni, which announced over 5 million profiles in 5 months in July. They’ve also been getting a great deal of the press. However, Geni still has a long way to go when taking on the established ancestry industry. MyHeritage has a large lead on the site with over 10 million registered users of their site. Ancestry.com, the leading genealogy site, has added 5.6 million people to their family trees this week.

As a sign of the competition, MyHeritage will now be making all the Pearl Street Software free.