MySpace Announces Mashup With Facebook

You Can Now Log in to MySpace with Facebook. The latest Facebook integration may help keep existing members happy with a more personalized experience, but MySpace still has work to do to regain that mind share and recapture traffic, said Augie Ray, social media analyst with Forrester Research Inc

MySpace Inc. announced it is doing a Mashup with Facebook, integrating the basic functions of its former rival in a move to make the one-time king of social networking a more relevant "social entertainment" destination.

The mashup essentially reconnects MySpace to the type of massive social networking activity it once had before it was surpassed by Palo Alto's Facebook Inc.

Starting today, MySpace members will be seeing a "Mashup with Facebook" button on their homepage to access the opt-in feature. Clicking on it will pull in their "likes" and other interests already stored on their Facebook profiles.

That, in turn, will signal MySpace's algorithms to start feeding relevant topic pages, profiles, video programing, music, celebrity news and other information into their MySpace streams.

It isn't the first collaboration between the two companies. More than one million members have synced their MySpace status updates with their Facebook profile in the month since the introduction of "Sync with Facebook."

MySpace, which is based in Beverly Hills and owned by media conglomerate News Corp., will soon be installing a Facebook "Like" button across its site.

In a Web conference with reporters, MySpace CEO Mike Jones said Mashup will build on that relationship, although he wouldn't speculate on how much new traffic it will bring.

MySpace has already acknowledged Facebook as the winner in the battle for social networking supremacy and has been redesigning itself as a social entertainment destination targeted at a younger Gen Y audience.

Dan Rose, Facebook's vice president of partnerships and platform marketing, said the partnership is a good mashup of Facebook's strategy to build a social networking platform and MySpace's new social entertainment strategy.

The partnership does not include any financial components, suchas ad revenue sharing.

Facebook has more than 500 million active members, while MySpace still has a fairly large user base of about 130 million. But Facebook's rise has also diminished awareness of MySpace among Internet users.

The latest Facebook integration may help keep existing members happy with a more personalized experience, but MySpace still has work to do to regain that mind share and recapture traffic, said Augie Ray, social media analyst with Forrester Research Inc.

"It will get people to come back and encourage people to share with their friends," Ray said. "It makes MySpace instantly a more rich experience."

MySpace Announces Mashup With Facebook