MySpace, Twitter deal another step to a unified Web
We live in a splintered social-networking society. We use one window to update Facebook, another to post to MySpace, and a third to tweet. (A fourth, if you're one of those LinkedIn people.) At best, it makes for a disorienting experience. So over the past couple years, many Silicon Valley innovators have pushed for a single, universal platform – one ring, if you will, to unite them all.
Will it work? Hard to tell. But in the meantime, we have a new case study. Today, MySpace rolled out a two-way sync with Twitter, a functionality which should allow MySpace users to syndicate their updates via tweet. The process is pretty simple. Let's say John goes to a baseball game. On the way back from the game, he decides to update his MySpace status using his mobile phone.
He types out the update. He posts it to MySpace. Finally, John can choose whether to have the message appear on both MySpace and Twitter, or only on MySpace. John's Twitter will then display "MySpace" as the origin of the tweet – just like it identifies the Twitterfeed or TweetDeck services. OK, so it doesn't sound particularly exciting.
But it could be a big step forward in the way that one social network inter-meshes with the next.
"At MySpace, we believe in open content distribution and want to help users socialize around content in many different places," Sharon Nguyen , Senior Product Manager at MySpace, wrote in a blog post. "We’ve been hearing from users, content creators, and celebrities that they want an easy, secure way to update both their MySpace and Twitter accounts," Nguyen added.
The Twitter team-up is the second major announcement from MySpace in a month. In August, MySpace announced it would acquire iLike, a popular music streaming and discovery tool. The agreement strengthened MySpace’s grip on the music market – iLike is second only to MySpace Music in popularity – and extended the reach of the social network, which has lost serious traffic in recent months to Facebook.
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