Like a beleaguered presidential candidate who won only two states in a general election and yet refused to concede for months, MySpace has finally surrendered social networking functionality to
Facebook. On the heels of a flashy redesign where MySpace quite literally struggled with its identity, actually visually replacing the "space" in its name with a blank line, the News Corp-owned social
network Thursday announced a partnership with Facebook.
Essentially, the Facebook Connect
functionality officially turns MySpace into the online publisher with its own separate community that we've all known it's been for the past couple of years (though, admittedly its community is more
robust than most).
MySpace CEO Mike Jones made the announcement Thursday, referring to his goal of making MySpace the "leading social entertainment destination." But while MySpace sent its top
dog to make his conciliatory announcement, Mark Zuckerberg watched from the comfort of Palo Alto, and sent Dan Rose, vice president of partnerships and platform marketing at Facebook to the press
conference -- the equivalent of the sitting president staying at Camp David and not sending his Veep, but maybe the Treasury Secretary, or another low ranking cabinet member.
Which is not to
say that Rose didn't bring any swagger. In fact, it seems his sole function was to put MySpace in its proper place. "This is a great example of MySpace's new direction, which is very focused on
entertainment," he said, the way you'd tell a child his crayon drawing is really terrific, and doesn't that look just like a real dog. Oh it's a horse?