Well, we all know that Facebook is about eighty seven times better than MySpace, and the decision of the latter to put an exec from the former into its top job is presumably proof of that.
Yes, MySpace has announced that, having successfully pushed out (by "mutual consent" of course) founder Chris DeWolfe last week, they have recruited Owen Van Natta as their new CEO. The former Facebook exec is currently CEO of Project Playlist, the online music service which was at one time sued by all four majors for enabling users to stream unlicenced music through their social network profiles, though which has since reached licensing deals with both EMI and Sony.
In his new job heading up MySpace, Natta will report directly to Jonathan Miller, the Chief Digital Officer of parent company NewsCorp. Miller presumably hopes that Natta, who headed up revenues and operations at Facebook and previously had a business development role at Amazon, can quickly turn round the fortunes of the social networking firm, which is yet to deliver much return on NewsCorp's considerable investment when it bought the web service in 2005.
The problem, of course, is that MySpace is now an outdated platform compared to most of its competitors in the social networking market, in particular Facebook, and bringing it up to speed would probably require scrapping everything and starting again. And while MySpace remains the default social network for musicians, even that status is threatened as more and more artists start to communicate with fans via Facebook and Twitter, and while rivals like Pandora and Spotify gain more ground in the streaming music domain. As previously reported, MySpace's enhanced music service in the US, designed to take on the Pandoras and Spotifys of the world, has yet to capture anyone's imagination.
Back at Project Playlist, which Natta only joined six months ago, MTV co-founder John Sykes has already been appointed as a new CEO.