14 DAY TRIAL // With Facebook at 400 million users and MySpace bleeding more each month, it has been clear for a while now that the social networking wars are over. But don't cast off MySpace for dead just yet, there may be some life in it left, or at least that's what News Corp. is hoping. For the past few months, there has been a clear focus on content as a differentiating factor but now we have a new direction, discovery. People discovery, content discovery, MySpace wants to be the place where you go to get all the cool new stuff.
At least, that's what TechCrunch is claiming, citing multiple sources. MySpace apparently held a meeting, after the ousting of CEO Owen van Natta, with all of its local and international employees to reveal the change in direction. MySpace's new tag line is "Discover and be Discovered," and social networking will take a backseat to content discovery and recommendation.
The idea is that users will want to come back to MySpace more often if there's new stuff to find so they start to get all sorts of recommendations, some of which may be ads. All the data will feed into the new activity stream MySpace has just launched that already brings in more data than just status updates. Facebook has had something like this for quite a while now, but MySpace aims to take it one step further and make it a central piece of the site.
There's more in store and the site is heading for a complete redesign to go along with new branding and direction. At this point, there's not that much MySpace can lose, it's clear that as a social network, although it's still huge, it can't hope for anything, there really is just one game in town, Facebook. But content discovery is certainly not a novel idea, plenty of sites have done it before, some more successfully than others but none has made it to the big time.