The month ahead: Social networks to shake things up in May

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>> Sumi: Hello I'm Sumi Das for ZDnet. Joining me now are Senior Editor Sam Diaz, Sam thank you for being with us.

>> Sam: Sure, thank you for having me.

>> Sumi: So we're going to take a look ahead at the month of May and one of the things that we're sort of keeping our eye on is the maturing of the social networking sites. Tell us what's going on on that front.

>> Sam: That's right so you got the 3 big players you've sort of got the Twitter, the Facebook and the MySpace. A lot of momentum around Twitter you've got Oprah's Midas touch happening out there, you know, a lot of people talking about it. What you don't hear anyone talking about is the money where's Twitter bringing in the money. Well Twitter has said that by the first half of the year they would have some sort of revenue plan, well, it's May. That clock is ticking; the pressure's on you don't want to lose that momentum so Twitter's got some work that needs to either start working on or start releasing some details on it so we know what's going on. Now on the Facebook side Facebook has opened up the data stream to developers which as raised a whole other issue of privacy, you know, how much information do Facebook users really want out there, so there's definitely going to be some grumbling. Facebook users tend to grumble and Facebook tends to respond sometimes so we may see some tweaks on that as well. And then lastly you go into MySpace. Now, poor MySpace it's lost some of its momentum over the year. You Score paid a lot of money for it and they don't want to see it lose that so there's been a little bit of a shake up at the top. The executive leadership, the founders are more like an advisory role now and former Facebook COO Owen Vanada assumed spelling has come in to take control of the company and head it maybe into a new direction. I don't know what they can do with it yet but it'll be interesting to see what they do to respond to the momentum that we're seeing at Twitter and Facebook, definitely an interesting time.

>> Sumi: Okay, moving on to the data center industry. The big development was the news that Oracle is going to acquire Sun. How does this, looking forward, change the landscape?

>> Sam: Well I think this sort of shows that we move beyond just the big players, you know, we sort of thought that the data center wars were gonna be the big guys, HP, Dell, you know, Cisco and that didn't necessarily happen that way because we've got others that have come into play here. Now Sun and Oracle are a player there now too and I think that it sort of shows that through acquisitions, through deals, through those sort of things that we may see some players that we didn't expect there to be there. I'll be at EMC World later in the month and I expect to hear some announcements on what's happening in storage and cloud competing in virtualization and hopefully some deals out there too.

>> Sumi: Finally let's talk about the iPhone which we haven't done in a while. There was some buzz going around about a deal between Apple and Verizon, what do you think fact or fiction?

>> Sam: You've got to love the rumor mill, right?

>> Sumi: I love the rumor mill.

>> Sam: We are a month out from the Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference so of course we've got to have these rumors.

>> Sumi: Which is when the rumor mill really kicks into high gear.

>> Sam: That's right, that's right and here we are now with this great, but this is a great rumor, you know, this is one that people have been asking for myself included. You know Verizon Wireless; 86 point 6 million users in the U.S. that's a great market that Apple is not getting right now but could. The exclusive deal with AT&T ends next year AT&T has gone on the record and said they wanted to extend their partnership in the relationship with Apple sort of everybody wants the iPhone it could be a great time for Apple. If they're gonna start working out some sort of deal now's the time to start talking about it.

>> Sumi: Okay Sam, social networking sites, the data center industry and iPhone slash Verizon all 3 areas that you'll be keeping an eye on for us for the month ahead.

>> Sam: That's right.

>> Sumi: Thank you Sam.

>> Sam: Sure

>> Sumi: For more you can always go to Blogs.ZDnet.com.

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