Social-networking giant MySpace on Tuesday said it inked a deal with Zazzle, a do-it-yourself merchandising startup that plans to allow the 6 million bands on MySpace to sell custom tchochkes to the public.

The marriage of music and custom-branded knickknacks is hardly new, but the deal reduces what would normally be a multi-step process to a point-and-click exercise, which both firms hope will generate significant revenue.

Palo Alto, California-based Zazzle, which has taken $16 million in funding, allows anyone to upload designs, which Zazzle can then print on hundreds of products including T-shirts, hats, and coffee mugs.

Zazzle, which attracted Google backers John Doerr and Ram Shriram, uses printing processes that allow it to take an uploaded design and ship products imprinted with that design in 24 hours.

See more by http://www.redherring.com/Home/23064

Awww. MySpace is really starting to improve its user interface and navigation/networking options. It’s just released a new home page, which seems to be moving in the direction of a personalized start page (but not quite yet). So what have we got? Customized color combinations and multiple layout options, similar to RealEditor. Choose which modules you’d like to appear in what parts of your homepage using drag’n’drop capabilities. The new profile editor is only available for Internet Explorer users.

A couple smaller tweaks include the ability to control volume on the music player, a music history link complete with options to see what your friends are listening to (how very social!), and customizable options for the player as well. New options for forums lets you see all of your posts, and save other posts as well. Forums search and a font tool bar are on their way. So a few of the major changes include the new friends view on the profile page, which lets you filter your friends based on who’s online, who’s a mutual friend, etc. Some of these options were available specifically from the Friends page, but now they’re accessible from your home page.

The photos section has also been modified for easily moving and deleting a large group of photos, picking an album cover, and the ability to link images to friends’ profiles. For composing messages, you can now save your friends’ information so that you can send a message without having to go to their profile page. This is also helpful because you’ll now be less inclined to get frustrated while searching for a friend that’s changed his user name. I’m so glad that MySpace recognizes the difficulties in finding other users within its network, and I hope that its search greatly improves in the coming months.

Most importantly, there are also new privacy options for your ac count, with the addition of a spam tab. This new tab lets you select things like who can send you messages, what type of person can add you as a friend, and the requirement of a CAPTHCA verification in order to send you a friend request. I’m sure you’ll all reading this and thinking the same thing I am–sounds like Facebook. From the tightening of content around your social sphere (or is “graph” the official term now?), to the new privacy capabilities, MySpace is changing its navigation and privacy options for the better.

Unlike Digg users, I think the MySpace community will appreciate these changes made to their personal network. Friendster has also been making some changes to its profile options, including fan profiles and the new “separate circles” options.

MySpace has put the axe to yet another startup. Last night they made a call threatening legal action against freshly launched TellThem.mobi, a service that lets you message all your friends from your mobile phone.

TellThem’s site simply reads:

“On Wednesday August 29th, 2007, we got a call from MySpace threatning to take legal action if we didn’t take the website down. Apparently it violates their terms of service…. switch to Facebook.”

Switch to Facebook indeed. TellThem is only one in a long line of startups getting bullied by MySpace. Previously they killed DatingAnyone, SingleStatus, copied RealEditor, stalled all widgets, and played chicken with PhotoBucket.

I’m surprised this continues to happen when MySpace is trying to embrace developers through a developer platform. Overzealous legal stiff-arming is only contributing to the brain drain around growing MySpace and driving developers to greener pastures.

TellThem plans to move on to Bebo as well.

Thanks for the tip Marshall.

Update: MySpace’s complaint centered around TellThem serving as a proxy for logging into people’s MySpace accounts. The concern is that services like this could be phishing sites collecting credentials for malicious use. Jason Cox, of TellThem said collecting the credentials was necessary because there is no API for accessing the messaging functionality they use. This was not the case for Jason’s last MySpace related startup, BuddyWave.

The Director of Mobile operations has already emailed TellThem and asked them to develop for Facebook. (Nick Gonzalez)