New York — News Corp. owned MySpace’s messaging interface may soon take a new shape for the better. Late yesterday, the struggling social network confirmed that it is acquiring the assets and staff from Threadbox, a real-time social chat platform that plans to combine elements of email and prides itself in comparisons to Facebook.
The deal comes as the News Corp-owned social network unleashed a redesigned profile page with an emphasis on news feeds, condensed navigation menus and the facility to follow friends on other networks. MySpace is experiment with new pages and invites user feedback, promising to share more details in the coming weeks.
“We are delighted to announce that the talented Threadbox team has joined MySpace. We are in active discussions about how we can incorporate their innovative technology into our site,” MySpace said in a statement.
A short statement on the Threadbox homepage explains the activities of the company’s service is all about in reasonably objective terms, “Threadbox Messenger combines the convenience of email, real-time, and presence from instant messaging, and the simplicity and effortless sharing of social communications.” Then, furthermore in even bigger lettering, the homepage asserts, “Threadbox Messenger is the new email.”
According to Threadboxs’ Website, the technology empowers users to access conversations that would “otherwise be fragmented in e-mail.” The “thread” in Threadbox is a single Web page that tracks everything going on in a person’s daily activity, which sounds similar to the news feed now popular on most social-networking sites.
Nevertheless, unlike most social chat tools, Threadbox mainly concentrates on making e-mail as a real-time messaging experience. Like an instant message box, Threadbox displays users who among their list of friends is available online, and allows you to post and receive messages, files, images. Not that different from what most instant message services do, but the e-mail aspect is a bit novel.
MySpace has been struggling for some time and is eagerly expecting to improve its communications services with the Threadbox deal. The network has tried to revive its communications before, rolling out free email accounts last year and claiming to have smashed its user targets in January by exceeding 15m accounts. The Threadbox deal could help combine its messaging and email options into a unified service.
Furthermore, the new profile pages may also motivate users to communicate more often through their MySpace accounts, potentially driving traffic. This is crucial as MySpace is suffering from a drastic decline in user numbers and engagement. According to internal figures seen by TechCrunch Europe, monthly visits to MySpace UK halved to just 5m since the beginning of the year, and the trend is thought to be similar in other countries.
Threadbox made its debut as Cc:Betty at the 2009 DEMO conference, and was re-established in beta as Threadbox in spring 2010. The company promises a “simple and pragmatic collaboration platform that helps workgroups effortlessly increase productivity by harnessing the group’s conversations, files, tasks, dates, and opinions.”
Threadbox asserts it has 60,000 users scattered among 20,000 businesses, which could contribute at least an incremental revenue boost, something MySpace would aspire to have.
This is the MySpace’s first acquisition since co-president Jason Hirschhorn resigned his post last month. Although, the company did not disclosed the specifics of the deal, but it was likely to be fairly moderate as Threadbox has raised just US$2 million since it was founded two years ago in Palo Alto, California.