Facebook and MySpace made a joint announcement today! They will start sharing data! Huge news for two rivals, right? Except it's pathetic. Porting info from Facebook to MySpace is the table scraps of the former spoon fed to the latter.
MySpace has barely mattered for more than a minute now—but today's announcement could have been big news, if only because it was so strange for them to be doing anything jointly at all. The pair collaborating is like two catty popular high school girls hanging out together, only now one is sort of fat and sad and nobody likes her anymore, except terrible bands and spam robots.
Essentially, the "Mashup" (because the word mashup makes anything cool) means that MySpace users will, with "a simple one-click set-up," be able to import their respective Facebook likes and interests into their MySpace account, providing personalized stuff for said MySpace user. So, if you "like" someone on Facebook, you'll get matched up with their MySpace page. The meaning of this should be clear. MySpace, on its own, is boring and washed up. It realizes it has a cow that ain't selling milk—and needs to reach out to the big guy for some help. We're plugging our interests into Facebook, not MySpace. Our online lives are with Zuckerberg, not Tom. MySpace is a wasteland. Not even—wastelands are popularized in stories and movies. MySpace is someone's aunt's decrepit basement, filled with mildewed towels and faded souvenirs.
It's a desperate act on MySpace's part, an acknowledgement of their irrelevance and Facebook's social data dominance. And saddest of all? Facebook just doesn't give a shit about MySpace. The fact that Facebook is comfortable letting you carry your precious info to what at least used to be a direct competitor shows how little competition is actually going on. It's the equivalent of giving away your raggedy old t-shirts to charity. Now, of course, this isn't an act of charity—perhaps MySpace had to drop some cash on Facebook's lap before this happened—but it solidifies MySpace's place as a haggard has-been. When was the last time you used your account? Do you even have one anymore? Would anyone have been talking about MySpace today if it weren't for them taking Facebook's sloppy seconds?
Probably not. This wasn't a deal, it was a white flag. [MySpace]