The Social Protocol For 8/17/09: MySpace Last Try At Relevance; Twitter Smacks Down Pay Schemes from USocial

But they are already irrelevant to most now, even with this latest acquisition for a whopping $20 million.

MySpace is close to acquiring popular social music service iLike, we’ve confirmed with multiple sources. The deal, which should close this week, will be MySpace’s first acquisition since new CEO Owen Van Natta took control of the company in April 2009. The price is “around $20 million.”

I guess for music, My Space is still rele....oh, who am I kidding.

Also in news, another great move from the best social network right now:

According to a statement sent to us by uSocial, who markets products like a “$1,000 Twitter followers for $87” package, “Twitter has recently moved to [shut us down], by claiming [we're] “spamming.” uSocial takes issue with this claim, saying, “the definition of spam is using electronic messaging to send unsolicited communication and as we don’t use Twitter for this, the claims are false.”

The company probably put itself on Twitter’s radar last week, when they issued news that they had sold Michael Jackson thousands of Twitter followers before his death. However, uSocial has been operating in the pay-for-play social media realm for sometime – last year, Digg sent them a cease and desist after discovering they were selling votes to those looking to catapult their stories to the social news site’s homepage.

No official word from Twitter yet on why they are going after uSocial, though uSocial says the spam accusations came from a “brand management organization.” In other words, it could be that Twitter simply doesn’t want its brand to be associated with shady marketing schemes – a smart move considering that all signs point to at least part of Twitter’s business model being built around providing its own premium services to brands hoping to reach the Twitter audience.

These uSocial people are kind of pathetic that they scam people for any profits they can make. And I'm glad Twitter, as well as Digg, stopped that B.S. right in its tracks.