SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 16, 2007 (AFP) - MySpace and Skype announced Tuesday they are meshing social networking with Internet telephony, creating the largest voice-connected online community on Earth.

The partnership comes as MySpace rival Facebook gains ground and Internet telephony pioneer Skype struggles for ways to profit from the technology.

Skype will craft its voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) into MySpace instant messaging software worldwide by December, letting website members easily call each other's computers free of charge.

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 23, 2007 (AFP) - MySpace and MTV said Thursday they have joined forces to let candidates for the US presidency individually discuss ideas and issues with young people in online webcasts.

The social-networking website and Viacom-owned MTV.com will host 'interactive real-time presidential dialogues' in which candidates field questions from college campus audiences and from people watching on the Internet.

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 8, 2007 (AFP) - MySpace on Wednesday added The Onion's notoriously mocking news satire to the popular social networking website's youthful recipe.

'The news business is like the tobacco business: you want to reach new readers at as young and impressionable an age as possible,' Onion president Sean Mills said. 'MySpace was, of course, a natural partner in that regard.'

LAS VEGAS, Aug 5, 2007 (AFP) - By the time Rick Deacon was done Sunday showing hackers in Las Vegas how to commandeer MySpace profile pages, he was evicted from the social networking website and the weakness fixed.

The US college student uncovered a MySpace vulnerability months ago and shared his discovery at DefCon, the largest gathering of computer hackers in the world.

LAS VEGAS, Aug 3, 2007 (AFP) - Hackers and computer security specialists gathered in Las Vegas on Friday took aim at popular social networking websites, exposing ways to plunder data from software 'cookies' used to track users.

Revelations made at an international gathering of hackers dubbed DefCon come as Internet rivals Google, Microsoft, and Ask acquire firms that rely on cookies to better target money-making online ads.

'Websites could easily fix the problem by encrypting cookies,' Errata Security chief executive Robert Graham told AFP.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 26, 2007 (AFP) - MySpace announced Thursday it has teamed with the Producers Guild of America in a contest giving amateur video makers a chance to get into the television show business.

MySpace and Fox Broadcasting Company, both owned by News Corp., along with the guild said 'The Story Teller Challenge' competition is designed to recruit a new generation of talent to television programming.

PARIS, July 23, 2007 (AFP) - Fears that teenagers using the social networking website MySpace are exposing themselves to sexual predators by disclosing too many personal details are probably overblown, researchers say.

Criminologist Sameer Hinduja of Florida Atlantic University and Justin Patchin, a political science researcher at the University of Wisconsin, randomly selected 9,282 profiles out of the 100 million purportedly available on MySpace.