Will MySpace's management restructuring work? More pointedly, "with no buzz factor, low scores for 'user trust' in online surveys and a reputation as a hangout for disaffected teenagers, is MySpace still viable as a broad-based, come-one-come-all social network?" asks The Wrap's Maria Russo. Several bloggers are already writing dirges for the News Corp. site. "The more cynical among us are already comparing MySpace to soon-to-disappear GeoCities," VentureBeat's Eric Eldon said last week, following the news that Yahoo would scrap GeoCities, which it bought for around $3 billion in 1999. The appointment of former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta as …

Twitter's phenomenal growth has been well documented, but its month-over-month audience retention rate is a mere 40%, says Nielsen Online, meaning that more than 60% of its users fail to return the following month. By comparison, Facebook and MySpace have retention rates of nearly 70%. "Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty," David Martin, Nielsen Online's vice president for primary research, said in a blog post. "Let there be no doubt: Twitter has grown exponentially in the …

Facebook "could not be doing better financially," COO Sheryl Sandberg asserts in an interview with Bloomberg News, and the social networking giant does not need to raise money, either. "We absolutely do not need to take money," she said. "We might take money -- but it doesn't mean we need to." Facebook might not be reeling financially, but it is trying to expand amid the worst market for Internet advertising since the dot com bust, notes Bloomberg's Brian Womack. Sandberg admits that Facebook was "nervous" following the collapse of Lehman Brothers last year, but now she says the company is …

Facebook may have made "a major move" on Monday by opening up the data on its site to third parties, "but the conversation on Facebook remains fundamentally closed due to extensive privacy limitations and the company's disinterest in overcoming those limitations in an appropriate way," says Read Write Web's Marshall Kirkpatrick. "Conversation on Facebook is no more easy to analyze today than it was yesterday; that's the real opportunity here, not just the ability to send and receive Facebook messages through different applications." The really bad news for developers is that the data they are able to work with is …

Facebook on Monday opened up massive parts of its site to third party developers, a move that effectively allows other sites to let users post updates, share pictures and links, and interact with Facebook without ever visiting Facebook.com. "Apparently, the company is prepared to lose gobs of traffic and, in turn, revenue from display ads on the site," notes BusinessWeek's Douglas MacMillan. Software developers are now likely to build thousands of different Web sites, desktop clients and mobile apps using the new Facebook Open Stream API. "You're going to see people creating a lot of different means of interacting with …

Time Warner may be preparing to tell investors as early as tomorrow that it's close to spinning off AOL, enabling the media giant to focus on its films and cable TV assets. As recently as February, CEO Jeffrey Bewkes said spinning off all or part of the Web unit was one option. AOL's fate will certainly be a focus of Time Warner's earnings call Tuesday. Michael Morris, an analyst at UBS AG believes AOL could be a separate company as soon as six months from now. "A very important piece of the investment thesis is the ability to excel …