MySpace mashes up with Facebook Connect

Former social tech rivals join forces as MySpace continues evolving social entertainment business

Looks like Girl Talk isn’t the only mashup artist in town.

MySpace, having long since surrendered the social graph to Facebook, announced Thursday a partnership with its former rival that will allow users to log in to MySpace via Facebook Connect. As with any other Connect implementations, users will be able to cross-post status updates from Facebook to MySpace.

Both companies, represented by MySpace CEO Mike Jones and Facebook VP Dan Rose, revealed the news at a special Webinar for the media called “Mashup with Facebook.”

The new feature is already live on MySpace.com and pretty prominently displayed on the right side of the page. Apparently, one of my friends has already connected to MySpace with his Facebook account. And he’s not alone. Around a million people have already made the connection, and this is only day one.

This shift had been happening for the past couple years, but the last step in MySpace’s transformation from predominantly a social network to predominantly a social entertainment hub was fully realized with the company rebranding and site redesign publicly launched at the end of October. From the logo to the home page to the user profiles, every avenue of MySpace is dedicated to delivering personalized entertainment content like music and news.

Making it possible for Facebook users to connect to MySpace is a big win for the latter, especially since user profile data will come in handy when tailor-fitting an entertainment page for each user. With Like buttons strewn across the Web, Facebook is making it mind-numbingly easy for its users to build up robust profiles, complete with all their favorite music, movies and more. They don’t even have to think about it.

If those same users decide to access MySpace via Facebook Connect, that’s a lot of good, trustworthy data to work with.

Will it be enough for MySpace to revive its dying brand? That’s a hard question. A lot harder than “Is their new logo stupid?” But today’s announcement displays good business sense on behalf of Mike Jones and could mean MySpace is moving in the right direction.

Here’s a demo of the new product:

Facebook Mashup with MySpace from Nick O'Neill on Vimeo.