It’s been 24 hours since News Corp announced an international distribution arrangement with MySpaceTV and ShineReveille that would make shows like “Quarterlife” and “Roommates” available to wider audiences, perhaps producing localized versions for some areas. It’s also been about a week since an even bigger bombshell was dropped with the announcement of MySpace Music partnerships with Sony/BMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group.

These alignments bear much deeper implications that are indicative of a divergence in the core operating structure of the social network. While MySpace has always been “a place for music” and, indeed, media has always been apparent on the service, only within the past 18 months has its efforts in the field escalated to that of a true media platform.

Forgetting shticks like MySpace Black Carpets events and front page featured artists, the platform has evolved in major ways. The shift shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Facebook has been nipping at the heels of MySpace for the better part of a year. In the past two months, Facebook has leapt hurdles to put itself within inches of MySpace’s international traffic rates (MySpace still has almost double Facebook’s traffic nationally, but that’s another story).

But as these milestones have been passed, Facebook has stuck mainly to its roots. It’s a social network and in that sector, it reigns supreme. It innovates, others copy. Facebook News Feed, for all its initial controversy, is now one of the single most important features in social networking. So influential is it that MySpace (still #1 in the field) copied it blatantly in the form of Friend Subscriptions (yet another feature that automatically injects founder Tom Anderson into your life).

What becomes clear through mimicry of this nature is that MySpace is slipping. It’s not a freefall or anything, something more akin the sleepy sauntering stumble of a confused drunk. There’s a strange quality about sleeping of a drunk though in that our transgressions are laid bare in the light of day. For regular people, it’s often a period of introspection and promises to “never drink again,” for one of the largest sites on the Internet, it’s mainly about the introspection.

MySpace wasn’t the first player on the field. When it came into the game, it had a strong competitor in Friendster (which just launched in Indonesia, if anyone cares. Friendster proved wholly inept at managing its enterprise or scaling to size and by early 2006 Demetri Martin was already proclaiming that the service had gotten “kind of gay.”

The reason that Friendster failed is it never understood how to engage its community, an easy mistake to make in the early days of social networking — a period where no one really knew what was happening. MySpace swooped in and facilitated connections between anyone who wanted to connect, hell, the entirety of MySpace is in my “Extended Social Network.” It was a sea change in Web culture, a change that would contribute to mainstreaming the Internet to a degree that, not only was it socially acceptable, but hip to participate. Usurping a thrown, however, carries lessons; lessons that MySpace almost neglected to learn from.

When Facebook became an issue, it was because MySpace failed to evolve as a social networking platform. So effective was MySpace at linking people together, that it began to create considerable (and sometimes warranted) concerns about privacy, safety and a throng of other considerations. Facebook was ready to step up with a platform answering these concerns. People you know, hanging out in a walled garden. Your information, disseminated howsoever you chose fit. It was a fracture in social networking and an effect of mainstreaming. Success comes at a cost.

By this point, MySpace had already been wrestling with a prolonged identity crisis. Where once it was a homegrown network that existed on a manageable and organic level, it had found itself in the clutches of one of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. The takeover was another thing fueling privacy debates. Tom was a seemingly benevolent ruler. He was even willing to be your first friend. There was no way he would use your data for anything shady. News Corp was another story. It was with ties to all sorts of things, many of which most MySpacers don’t condone (like Fox News). To its credit though, News Corp was careful to let events play out natural without much intervention, dolling out connections and money where needed and refraining from simply barking out orders. The question is why?

Technorati Tags: social networking, social media, myspace, facebook, evolution, news corp, rupert murdoch, tom anderson

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