Facebook Is Saving MySpace. Wait, What?!

As written by Jeff Bervovici of Forbes and Emma Barnett of the UK's Telegraph, MySpace has added 1 million users in the past two months. Chris Vanderhook, MySpace's COO, recently attributed the recent spike in MySpace's membership to its "integration with Facebook and Twitter." At first glance, that completely blew my mind. Ever since I got a Facebook back in high school, I've always thought of MySpace as Facebook's most direct competitor. And even though MySpace hasn't really competed with Facebook in the past five years, it was still a little strange to see them working together.

Apparently, MySpace is no longer just a social networking site. It's been rebranded as a "socially-driven music discovery engine," and thus, is no longer competing with Facebook. So, for about 15 seconds I understood what Facebook was trying to accomplish by helping out MySpace. They're just diversifying their customer appeal by adding a music site.

Then I remembered that Facebook has been promoting Spotify, another socially-driven music discovery engine. So I am once again perplexed by Facebook's actions. I understand endorsing ONE social music app or site. It expands Facebook's CVP by allowing its music-loving users to listen to music conveniently while on Facebook. I don't, however, understand why it would endorse TWO competing music sources.

I suppose they could be endorsing both Spotify and MySpace and allowing the users to decide which one they like better. After some trial period, I assume they would drop, disallow, or otherwise disown whichever music app was least popular. That makes some sort of logical sense, but I still think it would make more sense to just pick one from the get-go and promote that app even more. What do you all think?