On MySpace's repositioning (Robert Scoble and Mike Jones at LeWeb)

A few days ago, my Empoprise-MU music blog contained a (supposedly) humorous post that was written after Robert Scoble accidentally shared all of his MySpace activity with his Facebook friends. The post also explained WHY Scoble[footnote] was active on MySpace:

.@_bradmerrill heh. I'm interviewing MySpace's CEO on stage next week at LeWeb. Figured I better do my homework!

Well, Scoble's interview of Mike Jones occurred earlier today, and Alex de Carvalho live-blogged it. Excerpt:

MySpace is focus­ing pri­mar­ily on the under-35 crowd. The new MySpace prod­uct is about social enter­tain­ment, around TV and movies. You cre­ate a per­son­al­ized stream of enter­tain­ment around you by con­nect­ing to your favorite movies, TV shows, and celebrities.

MySpace had to real­ize that they can­not win the social net­work­ing space, even while the web is becom­ing more social. How­ever, they wanted to become the best at deliv­er­ing an enter­tain­ment expe­ri­ence. The Face­book Con­nect / Face­book Sync part­ner­ship grew out of this shift in focus.

Read the rest here. However, that post does not cover one of Scoble's questions - the question that had to be asked. Mobile Entertainment:

Is MySpace in a 'death spiral', as moderator Robert Scoble put it on-stage at LeWeb this morning? He was sitting next to the right man to ask: new MySpace CEO Mike Jones.

"We have 130 million monthly active users today, so we still have this substantial user base," said Jones, while flagging up MySpace's recent relaunch as a social entertainment service.

Both sources noted that MySpace is actively pursuing mobile customers on multiple devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, and is also pursuing Google TV customers.

But will this be enough? Scoble, who revisited the MySpace site in preparation for the interview, asked a question of the session attendees. Vator.tv:

When Scoble asked for an audience show of hands of who had been to MySpace in the last two weeks, a sparse smattering of hands rose—less than 50 in a room of hundreds.

Then again, I'd bet that a good number of the attendees were outside of MySpace's target under-35 audience. Perhaps Scoble would have gotten a different response if he had gone out to a club.








[footnote]Apologies in advance to my FriendFeed readers for simply referring to "Scoble" here. I know that in the FriendFeed community, reference to a "Scoble" without providing a first name can be confusing. However, everyone's told us that FriendFeed is dead anyway, so I'm assuming that a more general audience will read this post - one that isn't all that interested in stock market predictions. (I'll take the Dow for 11,500, Alex.)