San Francisco — As Google attempts to make inroads in the social networking world with Buzz, now MySpace, once the 500 pound gorilla of social networking, with shrinking audiences, deep layoffs and two management shake-ups, has been in retreat for over a year — but the company’s new co-presidents are seeking to turn the site around with a new look, began wooing videogame developers as it moved to capitalize on the booming popularity of playing games online at social networks.
Co-Presidents Jason Hirschhorn and Mike Jones, who took charge after the recent resignation of CEO Owen Van Natta, unveiled a fresh plan to revamp the former social media giant — that includes a brand-new version of the site that will be implemented over the next few months. Recently at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, Jones showed off a new design that heavily promotes games.
“We initially adopted games a few years back with a gaming platform but at the end of the day it was fairly isolated in certain parts of MySpace,” MySpace co-president Jones said at a Game Developers Conference here.
“MySpace is going to put as much weight behind games as we put behind music.”
“We are at the point now where we need believers,” said Hirschhom, noting that the News Corp unit has encouraged various individuals not fully committed to the cause to leave and has hired new talent.
Games are just another kind of program that can function on today’s social networks. When Facebook initially moved ahead of MySpace, its main force seemed to be better design – the two social networks did essentially the same thing, but Facebook felt classier and more exclusive. Yet it was not long before Facebook had another advantage: apps created by outside developers, that attracted millions of new users.
According to Reuters , Hirschhorn expects the site to grow from 100 million users to 200 or 300 million users (Facebook has more than 400 million active users, according to its website). Hirschhorn did not give an expected time-frame for said growth.
The new site remoulds MySpace more strongly around its music and media content, with elements such as the ability to listen to a music playlist based on songs that other MySpace users are sharing in their stream of updates.
The goal is to boost growth among new users and to lure back users that have departed, says Hirschhorn.
After being overshadow by online social networking star Facebook, MySpace made itself into an Internet community for people who make or love music. MySpace sees its prime demographic as Internet users between the ages of 14 and 36.
Jones anticipates that by better interlacing online games into the fabric of the online community those figures can be doubled to 60 percent of MySpace users logging more than two billion minutes of play monthly.
Hirschhorn, a former executive with Viacom Inc.’s MTV Networks, joined MySpace in April 2009 as Chief Product Officer, part of a new management team that brought in Jones as Chief Operating Officer and Owen Van Natta as CEO. Less than 10 months later, Van Natta is gone, due to what a source close to the company said was a personality conflict among the trio. Van Natta could not be reached for comment.
The two new co-presidents would not comment on the shake-up, but said the revamp of the site now being announced is in keeping with the strategy all three executives devised over the past 11 months, including the August 2009 acquisition of Internet music sharing service iLike.
Analysts say developing on MySpace’s strength in music and entertainment is a sensible strategy, though some question whether the company will be able to create a unique offering amid a raft of rivals with similar goals, from Yahoo Inc, and music-service Pandora to Facebook.
MySpace is struggling to regain its lost glory and expand its popularity in a social networking world dominated by Facebook, which boasts more than 400 million users.
“MySpace is not falling off a cliff but, at the same time, they see gaming as a ladder to find their way into more people’s lives and get back on the radar,” said analyst Scott Steinberg, author of Get Rich Playing Games.