MySpace has suffered a number of "indignities" lately, Portfolio says. The social network has faced stagnating growth while rival Facebook continues to surge ahead, now approaching the News Corp. company's perch as the No. 1 social net in the U.S. MySpace Music, its joint music venture with the major record labels, has boosted usage among existing members but "has not caught fire" with the general public. Has MySpace lost its "cool factor?" In an interview, CEO Chris DeWolfe claims that MySpace is maintaining a strong growth position despite the economy-first quarter revenues are up 17%, he says. Profile portability is …

As Personal Technology's Walt Mossberg points out, when Microsoft makes changes to its browser, Internet Explorer, "vast numbers of people" are affected. Well, today, the software giant is making its biggest change to IE in years, with the new IE8. In a lengthy article, Mossberg reviews the updated version after months of testing. "I've found it to be a big improvement over its predecessor, IE7, and a much closer competitor to its main rival, Mozilla's Firefox," he says. In short, "IE8 is more stable than IE7, more compatible with industrywide Web standards, and packed with new features that improve navigation, …

Analyst Ross Sandler of RBC Capital Markets has made waves with a research note claiming that based on its current growth rate, Facebook will surpass Google in size by 2011-2012. Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget notes that this is a "startling" comparison, even though he doesn't believe Facebook can maintain current growth. Sandler also illustrates how important the social networking giant has become to Google as a source of traffic, as a whopping 19% of Google sessions now come from Facebook. "At the very least," Blodget says, "this will likely give Facebook the leverage to negotiate a sweet referral deal …

In a research report, Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield makes a couple of startling conclusions about Google's attitude toward social networking: one, the search giant doesn't care about social networking; two, social networking is gradually making search less relevant. According to Greenfield, Google's algorithm isn't well-suited to social networking sites, which is why its search deal with MySpace isn't performing as well as expected. "Nine months have gone by since our note, with MySpace now having just over a year left on its search deal with Google...and Google has done nothing to improve its social search algorithms," Greenfield says in …

Many industry watchers don't think Microsoft stands a chance in search, so why does the software giant persist in chasing Google? In short, "search is not solved," says Microsoft search team member Stefan Weitz in an interview with Ars Technica's Emil Protalinski. "We're not at where we'd like to be." Weitz explains that people are generally happy with search until the data shows they are no longer happy with it. Well, in the last six to 12 months, Microsoft has learned that only about a quarter of users are satisfied with the results of their first query; about half either …

VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi says Apple's new virtual goods platform for the iPhone "will likely produce a bonanza of revenues for game developers and publishers." The new platform should go live this summer once the new iPhone 3.0 software, which was also announced today, becomes available. As Takahashi notes, more than 2,000 of the 6,000-plus games on the iPhone are ad-supported applications, but it's "pretty hard" for developers to generate significant revenue from advertising alone. However, virtual goods models allow consumers to try games for free, paying only for add-ons like new levels, character customizations, or some sort of special power. …