News Alert

The social media site started by three entrepreneurial moms and geared toward kids younger than 13 years of age, Everloop.com, announced a new partnership today with two globally recognized kids’ brands, National Geographic’s Animal Jam and Mattel’s Monster High.

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I’ve shown up excessively late for parties. I know how it feels. Everyone else has settled into the mood of the thing and, after several conversations and drinks, become comfortable with the direction of the evening. They’re all having a good time and, regardless of how you try to catch up with the ongoing festivities, it’s often impossible to grab onto the same wavelength as everyone else. It’s an uncomfortable sensation that can ruin a potentially great event through the simple inconvenience of bad timing.

Facebook, with the announcement of its new music service, might get to know this feeling very well in the coming months.

Facebook Music (as I guess it should be called pending a proper name) looks to be coming — and coming very soon. Jon Fortt, CNBC’s technology correspondent, revealed the “breaking news” yesterday on CNBC’s Fast Money Halftime Report. The relevant quote has Fortt describing that he’s “hearing from someone familiar with the plans that Facebook plans to launch its long rumored music service at the F8 Conference on September 22nd.” He went on to say that “it seems likely that Facebook won’t actually host the music, but will partner with others who do.”

It seems like a good decision — Facebook plunging into the social music pool — but the timing, as mentioned above, may be a bit off. Facebook Music will be going head to head with Music Beta by Google (currently the focus of some new corporate attention) alongside already established offerings from Apple and Amazon. As we’ve seen through the public’s waning interest in Music Beta by Google (itself suffering from the same problem that Facebook Music may ultimately face — alienating an excited public by creating apathy during the wait for long-expected services) it can be difficult to determine how, exactly, a new music service, even one created by an internet giant, will catch on. The iron grip imposed by iTunes doesn’t look to be faltering anytime soon and even the heady promise of Cloud-based storage/streaming hasn’t made a sufficient dent in the industry’s currently successful business model of smaller per-song/per-album payments and downloads.

Facebook’s deeply loyal userbase could be enough to attract an initial fanbase however. If the service offers something truly innovative (or is even just more perfectly streamlined than the competition) it could be enough to upset the current balance of listeners and shake up the social music scene. Proper, unobtrusive integration of the service into current versions of the Facebook client could help to make for a natural transition but overt, on-site marketing could have the opposite effect. Facebook will have to have some pretty impressive concepts in place — and functional — before late September if they want to take advantage of their existing audience without driving them over to the similar double-whammy of Google’s Music Beta and Google+ social music cohort.

But, for now, all speculation is based on just that: speculation. Without the benefit of any details, aside from a prospective launch date, there isn’t much to do but wait and see if Facebook has arrived to the party in the nick of time or far too late.

In a recent article on the status of the could music battle between Amazon, Google and Apple, I tendered my opinion that victory wouldn’t be based on chronological order, but on a litany of factors. I also touched on the fact that Apple has a storied history of entering the market later than competitors with a superior product and almost immediately leaving said competitors to fight for a very distant second place. Well I’m not one who revels in saying ‘I told you so’ (that’s an absolute lie, I love it) but a recently unearthed patent application strongly suggests that Apple’s cloud-based music service could be a game changer.

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If it ain’t one thing, it’s another: Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t even given a chance to rest the one week he wasn’t being sued by the Winklevoss twins: the dark horse with the previously laughable case has now earned the title ‘most likely to take a whole lot of Zuck-bucks.’

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News organizations are rushing today to keep online readers and viewers up-to-date on details and new developments surrounding Thursday afternoon’s shooting at Fort Hood Army Base in Texas in which 13 people were killed.

Beyond the expected deluge of articles and videos, news organizations are deploying a brand-new tool: Twitter Lists, the microblogging site’s new feature that was rolled out last week.

Among the news organizations that have quickly compiled Fort Hood-related Twitter Lists are:

New York Times: http://twitter.com/nytimes/fort-hood-shootings

CNN: http://twitter.com/cnnbrk/fort-hood

NBC’s The Today Show: http://twitter.com/todayshow/forthood

Los Angeles Times: http://twitter.com/LATimes/fort-hood-shootings

Washington Post: http://twitter.com/washingtonpost/forthood

Dallas Morning News: http://twitter.com/DallasCrime/fort-hood-shootings

The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/05/fort-hood-shooting—live_n_347623.html

The New York Times Twitter List in particular is proving very popular, with 400 followers (and counting). In contrast, the Washington Post‘s list has only three followers as of this writing.

Also, the Austin-American Statesman created a separate Twitter account (not a list) specifically for the Fort Hood shooting that now has more than 3,400 followers.

Update: The Statesman has created a Twitter List from its new @FtHoodShootings Twitter account: http://twitter.com/FtHoodShootings/fort-hood

We’ll add more Lists as we find them. If you’re aware of any not mentioned above, please drop us a line in the Anonymous Tips box.

As our sister blog FishbowlNY reported yesterday, the massive layoffs expected at Forbes magazine came today:

Although we’re hearing that close to 100 people have lost their jobs company wide, David Carr reported that between 40 and 60 editorial staff members would get the axe. Those sort of cuts are huge in a staff of only 200. Who is left?

Our other sister blog, MediaJobsDaily, has the names of several editorial staffers who were pink-slipped.

Our sister site Fishbowl NY this afternoon reports that Forbes founder Steve Forbes has sent out a memo informing the staff that layoffs “are necessary across the entire organization.”

Fishbowl NY editor Amanda Ernst has the story and a copy of the memo. She writes:

We’ve heard that layoffs haven’t started yet, but it looks like the top level managers may already know who they have to cut and the bloodletting might start tomorrow.

Of course, no layoff memo would be complete without happy talk (that no one really believes) about the better days ahead. Here’s the Forbes version:

On the editorial side, we will maintain the essential strengths of Forbes while also deepening our relationships with our community. …

Forbes Media is laying the foundations for a strong, exciting future.

I’m sure that will thrill the people getting pink-slipped.

As expected, the Federal Communications Commission has approved by a 5-0 vote rules that would guarantee “net neutrality” for broadband and mobile Internet connections.

The vote doesn’t mean the rules will go into effect automatically. Rather, it kicks off a 60-day period in which the public and lobbyists can weigh in on the proposed regulations.

From Wired‘s Ryan Singel:

The FCC’s five commissioners unanimously agreed to expand and codify rules from 2005 that require cable and DSL providers to allow their customers to use whatever devices or online services they want so long as they don’t hurt the network. A similar rule applied to AT&T’s phone monopoly in the 1960s led to the fax machine, the football phone and the internet.

The leaders of a number of large Internet companies earlier this week implored the FCC to ensure net neutrality, which is opposed by telecommunications providers.

Proponents of net neutrality argue that new regulations are necessary to prevent broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing the delivery of Web content and applications to users. The carriers and some of their supporters in Congress say new government rules and regulations would discourage infrastructure investment and hamper further Internet development.

Our Mediabistro sister site, FishbowlNY, has a copy of the memo to NYT staffers from Executive Editor Bill Keller announcing further job reductions at the paper.

A couple of excerpts from Keller’s message:

Let me cut to the chase: We have been told to reduce the newsroom by 100 positions between now and the end of the year.

We hope to accomplish this by offering voluntary buyouts. …

As before, if we do not reach 100 positions through buyouts, we will be forced to go to layoffs. I hope that won’t happen, but it might.

You can read the full memo at FishbowlNY.

President Obama’s personal pitch for his hometown to host the 2016 Olympics was soundly rejected by the International Olympic Committee in Copenhagen today when Chicago was eliminated in the first round of voting.

From the New York Times:

Mr. Obama was the first American president to make an in-person appeal for a bid city and first lady Michelle Obama had also come earlier this week to lobby I.O.C. members for votes. Chicago’s bid leaders had worked for nearly four years and spent close to $50 million to bring the Olympics to the United States for the first time in 20 years. Chicago had been considered among Olympic insiders as a favorite to win the Games, along with Rio.

Tokyo was eliminated in Round 2, leaving Madrid and Rio de Janeiro as finalists. As you can see from the screenshot below, Matt Drudge barely could contain his disappointment over America’s defeat.