“This year, alongside the usual LimeWire search results, we’ll begin integrating links to extended content in LimeSpot, LimeWire Store and, eventually, across the web.” George Searle, LimeWire CEO, writes in his blog, “Soon, within LimeWire, you’ll be able to connect with participating artists, and drill down or sideways to see photos, find tour dates, watch music videos, find lyrics and buy music, tickets and merchandise.”

Last year, ZeroPaid reported on LimeWire developing a LimeWire store. Two years ago, ZeroPaid also reported on LimeWire integrating BitTorrent.

The LimeSpot website says that users can, “Be a blogger, whip up a wiki, foster a forum — or all of the above.”

At the same time, US lawmakers are attempting to force the social networking sites themselves to control the amount and kind of information that people, particularly children, can put on the sites.

Social networking sites have enjoyed phenomenal recent success. Industry leader MySpace has attracted 85m members with new members joining at a rate of 250,000 per day. Users, most often young people, use their own pages to swap information about themselves, their hobbies, their friends and their favourite music and films.

That kind of information is the subject of a research paper by a team from the University of Maryland in Baltimore. The paper, Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, proposes methods for combining the data posted on social networking sites and other computer databases to reveal information about individuals.

And really, who can blame us? Discovering a new band via P2P would require you to enter a broad search term like “rock music” and click on a file that looks vaguely interesting. The song you get probably wont suit your tastes because you really had no clue what you were looking for to begin with. Do you want angsty garage rock or 80’s glam? Both share a genre but occupy radically different ends of it. It’d be like shopping for a new car in a dealership that’s pitch black so you can’t see anything and the only preference you can specify is “Sedan.” You don’t get a chance to make any surface observations until you make the choice to buy it and take it home. Who knows if you’re getting a Lincoln Towncar or an old beat up Civic?

MySpace solved this problem by creating a window into the many volumes of new music that exist. Before making the commitment to downloading a band’s songs, you can visit a page with pictures, a quick description, and comments from like-minded listeners who’ve already checked ‘em out. Best of all, you can play their songs right on their site without downloading anything. With a click of your mouse, you’ll know immediately if a band is up your alley or not.

People are also reasonably confident that a trip to a band site wont hook their computer into a botnet or infect them with ad-spewing spyware. Most people I know don’t even use desktop P2P apps these days because of all the malware disguised as music. Shoddy bitrates are still out there, but you don’t have to waste time and bandwidth downloading bad quality music to your PC just to find out that the sound is crap.

If it sounds like I’m leaving P2P in the cold, I’m not. MySpace, for all its benefits retains the chief drawback of the client-server model: strained physical resources. Anyone can tell you that MySpace pages are slow and sometimes down entirely for hours of randomly scheduled maintenance. Ideally, the best scenario for music involves discovery on MySpace (or other mediums), and downloads on P2P networks that are better able to handle large swarms of downloads.

But as far as discovery goes, it’s no contest. Hats off to MySpace for figuring this one out.

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