MySpace Admits Defeat

After multiple CEO’s changes and redesigning the networks features countless times, MySpace has recently admitted it has been “pawned” by Facebook. So admitting this means that MySpace is shut down and out of commission, correct? Wrong! MySpace is now going to attempt to integrate the popularity of Facebook into MySpace pages. MySpace has enabled Facebook on their network, which enables users to integrate their friends, likes, photos, and music. The sites can now share these features and users can use either networks feature on their personal pages. By doing this MySpace is looking to play its strengths to position them as the social entertainment destination.

In 2005, News Corp bought MySpace for $580 million. At this time MySpace was social networking’s king. Shortly after Facebook opened up the network to users outside of college campuses, it has become a social network phenomenon. While increasing the number of users to 500 million to date, Facebook has impacted MySpace’s number of users and this started a decline to MySpace’s current 66 million users.

MySpace is hopeful that this change is the magic they needed to get the social network back on track. I think it will help them out. I believe there are multiple issues that need to be ironed out but after they figure out these issues, I think MySpace will overcome any obstacles and give users a great social entertainment site. This move is being compared to Yahoo!’s convergence with Bing. When Yahoo! began to lose the search engine battle to Google, they integrated their search engine with Bing. This helped combine the two sites and create a major player that can compete with the search engine giant, Google.

Do you think this is a good idea? Do you think that MySpace will position itself as the social entertainment destination or will it flop?