Social-networking 'traffic jam'

It's shades of the days when file-sharing was all over tech news and universities were trying to unclog their networks. Students at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas, have been told they have to use MySpace off the school network because their social-networking is slowing it down, the Associated Press reports. "Forty percent of daily Internet traffic at the college involved the site," the school's chief technology officer told the AP, which adds that MySpace is now up to 72 million+ members. TMCnet.com's report went into the development further. [As the New York Times reports, MySpace doesn't even quite know how to sell all those pages to advertisers- it's "charging bargain-basement rates to attract enough advertisers for the nearly 1 billion pages it displays each day" and trying to figure out how to help advertisers target those ads to "each member's personal passions."] Meanwhile, file-sharing at universities is still in the headlines: In their latest move against music and movie piracy, the RIAA and MPAA "sent letters to presidents of 40 universities in 25 states informing them of piracy problems on their schools' local area networks and asking for immediate action to stop it," CNET reports.