News Corp. is integrating its Fox Audience Network (FAN) business directly with MySpace. The company says this will allow MySpace to leverage the FAN team and technology platform. This comes as FAN President Adam Bain leaves the company for Twitter.

MySpace has launched a free music video application that can be accessed via its website or on the iPad.

The app called MySpace Music Romeo allows users to choose from 15 music genres such as pop or hip-hop and 13 moods including "chill" and "studying."

Music Romeo features a "Love" icon that users can click on when a favorite song is played and it will be added to their "Love" list. The more songs a user loves, the more Romeo plays music based on favorites.

MySpace has a new design for the user home page, which is available today on an opt-in basis, but should be rolled out completely by August 19th.

MySpace tells WebProNews, "The new user homepage prominently displays the activity stream and simplifies the content discovery experience.  As users log-in to MySpace, there is a prompt to opt-in for an early look at the new homepage."

U.S. representatives Ed Markey (D-Mass) and Joe Barton (R-Texas) sent a letter today to 15 companies identified in a recent Wall Street Journal investigation as installing consumer-tracking technologies to target users visiting these sites.

MySpace appears to be working on a new feature that could help give it a much-needed boost in consumer enthusiasm. From the sound of it, it’s almost like Digg meets the Facebook News feed (or Reddit meets Twitter, if you’d rather look at it that way).

Either way, it involves users voting content up and down, while giving them a way to tap into updates on topics of interest.

Playdom has been in the news a lot over the week as Disney announced its agreement to acquire the social gaming company. Today, Playdom announced a partnership with Harrah’s Interactive Entertainment to launch the Official World Series of Poker game on Facebook and other social networks.

MySpace and MTV.com are partnering to bring live streaming coverage of celebrities at Comic-Con.

Starting Thursday, July 22, daily live shows will be hosted by MTV Movies Editor Josh Horowitz and will stream on MySpace and MTV’s homepage. Users will be able to post comments and questions in real-time for a chance to have celebrities answer live.

MySpace is gradually introducing users to new profile pages in an effort to reduce the clutter of the old design.

Sean Percival, MySpace’s vice president of online marketing, tweeted his own "clean new" profile today.

"We’re testing a new look and feel of our site among users and the response so far has been positive," a MySpace representative told Mashable.

MySpace has long been criticized for poor design and as part of a turnaround effort, the struggling social networker has finally done something about it.  The new profiles are not available throughout the site, but Sean Percival, MySpace’s VP of Online Marketing, tweeted about his own "clean new" profile early on Friday.

MySpace’s messaging interface may soon take a turn for the better – and/or the Facebook-like.  Late yesterday, MySpace acknowledged that it’s acquiring the assets and team of Threadbox, which deals in real-time social messaging and takes some amount of pride in comparisons to Facebook.

MySpace users all over the world should have a much easier time discovering music thanks to some new changes.  This afternoon, MySpace overhauled its approach to playlists, eliminating (or at least cutting back) limitations that might have affected the way people shared songs.

News Corp is reportedly in talks with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo about striking a search advertising deal for its struggling social network MySpace.

Currently MySpace has a search advertising deal with Google that was reached in 2006 and is worth $900 million over a four-year period. That deal expires next month and News Corp needs to reach some kind of agreement on a new ad deal for MySpace, although any such deal will be for "significantly less money," according to the Wall Street Journal.

In Europe, Orange is an almost omnipresent organization – the third-biggest mobile operator and the second-biggest broadband Internet provider, according to its own stats.  And so it seems MySpace has made an interesting compromise by entering into an advertising and content partnership with Orange in France today.

MySpace has announced integration with Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail. The beta integration is rolling out to mutual users of the two services starting today.

"By integrating core features of both platforms, users will be able to discover what their friends are doing online through photos and the activity stream across social networks," says MySpace’s Manu Rekhi.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch let a cat out of MySpace’s bag a little early, revealing that the company would announce the departure of co-president Jason Hirschhorn tomorrow. A representative for MySpace just sent us the following statement from News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller on the matter:

Online ad firm Unicast reached out to us to talk about how it is helping the makers of The Twilight Saga engage the series’ fanbase online "where others have failed", and how the film industry is increasingly looking to online ad platforms to drive sales.

MySpace has an interactive, media and feature rich World Cup profile it’s showing off, as the event kicked off today.

"We’ve built this community for our users to act as an aggregate of the flurry of World Cup activity not only across MySpace but across the entire web including videos, live status updates and tweets via Kosmix, World Cup content from Fox Sports and Univision and much more," MySpace Manager of Corporate Communications Jessica Bass tells WebProNews.

The inner workings of MySpace Music – along with a lot of stuff users see – may be in for a significant upgrade.  The organization announced today that it’s named Dmitry Shapiro, who earned a degree of fame as the founder and former CEO of Veoh, as its chief technology officer.

MySpace announced today that it has struck a deal with Ad.ly, an ad service that serves in-stream advertisements, known mostly for its Twitter-related efforts. The deal will let content creators across MySpace (including celebrities, filmmakers, musicians and "social influencers") reach their fans and monetize their activity via the MySpace stream and Ad.ly, MySpace says.

Never mind the tactics of Facebook, Google, and other popular online companies; with its latest appeal to developers, MySpace appears to have taken a (good) page out of the AARP’s playbook.  The social network has brokered deals with a number of companies so that developers can save money on products and services by teaming up with it.

"MySpace Music profiles remain the simplest, fastest way to check out a new band", argues Ray Padget on Mashable. That’s a matter of opinion, but there’s no denying that MySpace is still a powerful player in the music space. So the big question may really be, can MySpace Music survive the wider MySpace decline?