Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to keep fighting the inevitable. In the case of Myspace, that means admitting the unpleasant — but equally undeniable — fact that it has lost the social-networking race to Facebook. The News Corp. subsidiary has been doing that gradually over the past few months, and the latest move in that direction came today, with the launch of a new feature that Myspace CEO Mike Jones called “Mashup with Facebook,” which allows users to import their Facebook profile, favorites and content into Myspace.
Jones said that the mashup feature would let Myspace members “create a personalized stream of entertainment content” based on their profile and favorites from Facebook, and that the launch was part of the network’s goal to be the web’s “leading entertainment destination.”
As a number of outlets have already reported, Facebook login integration with Myspace has been available for some time now (at least since yesterday), allowing new users to signup by using their Facebook profile in the same way many others do. Myspace also launched something called “sync with Facebook” in August, which allows users to connect their status updates and other activity with their Facebook profile or pages, and to push content from Myspace to the larger social network. Jones said Myspace was also planning to add Facebook “like” buttons to the site soon.
Dan Rose — Facebook’s VP of partnerships and platform marketing — pointed out during the news conference that thousands of other websites have already integrated with Facebook’s platform. But Myspace isn’t just any other service: it is the company that media kingpin Rupert Murdoch paid $580 million for in **, convinced that buying what was then the leading social network was the route to social-media riches for News Corp. Instead, traffic to the site has plummeted, despite refocusing on music and a recent heavily promoted redesign.
Myspace CEO Mike Jones reportedly told The Telegraph at the Monaco Media Forum last week that Myspace has effectively given up the social-networking race, and now sees itself as a “social entertainment destination” (Om wrote the social network’s obituary in February, after the departure of former CEO Owen Van Natta). Jones, meanwhile, said during the press call that he is excited about Myspace’s refocusing as an entertainment destination, and that he sees the new feature as “complementary” to Facebook.
The big question, of course, is whether this integration will matter or not. There may well be users who are devoted to Myspace who will use the connection with Facebook to pull their profile info and other content onto their Myspace page and maintain two separate social networking identities, but it seems more likely that this will accelerate Myspace’s slide. And it may be just the first step in accelerating the property’s ejection from News Corp. as well: in a recent conference call about News Corp.’s financial results, president Chase Carey said the site’s lifespan was being “measured in months, not years.”