MYSPACE INTRODUCES MASHUP WITH FACEBOOK
Myspace Users Can Easily Create Highly Personalized, Entertainment-Focused Streams Based on their Facebook Profile — Today, Myspace announced Mashup with Facebook, a new feature that allows Myspace users to easily create a personalized stream of entertainment content.
Context & Ripple Effects
Three years ago the framing was inverted: GigaOM called the mashup a litmus test for Web 2.0 start-ups, and coverage of MySpace's early lead in member-level ad targeting argued Facebook would need what MySpace already had. By November 2010 the hierarchy has flipped — Facebook's valuation has passed eBay's this week, making it the third-largest U.S. Internet business, and it launched Places days earlier.
Mashup with Facebook makes the reversal explicit: Myspace, once the owner of the biggest social graph on the web, now imports Facebook profile data to power personalized entertainment streams, with CEO Mike Jones joining Facebook at Thursday's joint by-invitation announcement. The pickup split cleanly — TechCrunch read it as "fully surrendering," Fast Company argued it isn't a loss for Myspace — and it lands in a crowded week for Facebook, which also overhauled messaging, absorbed a talent acquisition into it, confirmed an account-disabling bug, and said a fix is in process.
First-order effects
- Myspace repositions itself as an entertainment-content layer on top of Facebook's identity: users get personalized music-and-video streams without rebuilding a friend list, and Myspace stops competing on the social graph it pioneered.
- Facebook gains distribution of its identity layer inside a direct rival's product, extending the Places-and-messaging momentum from its own week of announcements.
Second-order effects
- Every mid-tier network now faces the same fork Myspace just chose on — plug into Facebook's graph or defend an independent one — which pressures laggards like Yahoo's Mash-style experiments toward integration or irrelevance.
- Advertisers following MySpace since its 2007 targeting lead see audience data increasingly mediated by Facebook's profile, shifting pricing power in display advertising toward whoever owns the identity record.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social graphs consolidate around one or two platforms while former general-purpose networks survive by specializing in content verticals — music, video, games — renting identity rather than owning it.
- A de facto single identity provider across competing consumer web services raises the stakes of that provider's outages and bugs, like the account-disabling glitch Facebook confirmed this week, turning platform reliability into an industry-wide dependency.
The trend: The consumer web is consolidating around a small set of identity platforms, with specialized content sites like Myspace renting social-graph access from the leaders instead of maintaining their own.