Social integration
When Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace in 2005 he owned the dominant social networking website. Four years later and the growth of Facebook as well as other social media sites like Twitter and Bebo is threatening to make snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
With the social media market maturing and consolidating - most recently with Facebook's acquisition of FriendFeed - MySpace has to do something, and it looks like it has. Several media, including TechCrunch and All Things Digital (which is also owned by Murdoch's News Corp), have reported that it will be buying social music service iLike for up to $20 million.
There doesn't seem to be any confirmation from either company yet, but if the deal does happen it looks like a coup for MySpace. Music has always been a more prominent feature of most MySpace sites than on Facebook and the acquisition of what appears to be the most popular music sharing service will cement that.
Acquiring iLike also helps MySpace in its direct competition with the other social networking sites as iLike claims to be the dominant music application on the Facebook, Orkut, hi5 and Bebo platforms. What such an acquisition will mean for iLike's presence on those sites remains to be seen.
