Mr.Farmville

MySpace seems to be adopting the old adage of “keep your friends close but your enemies closer” when it comes to relations with its social networking rival Facebook. Or perhaps it’s more a matter of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”.

The News Corp-owned MySpace has announced Sync for Facebook, which allows MySpace users to sync their status updates with their Facebook profile or Page. The tool also gives them the ability to share content such as music, videos, game apps, links and photos with their friends on Facebook.

Jennifer Ruffner, director of product, Stream at MySpace wrote on the company’s blog that the tool would allow the millions of musicians on MySpace to share their library of content, including full albums, with people who have ‘liked’ their Facebook page.

“This new sync functionality is part of an ongoing effort to make it simple for people to share their updates beyond MySpace and allow fans and friends to interact with that content across the web,” she said.

To use the tool, MySpace users must click on the settings box in the update module on their homage page, check the box next to Facebook (or Twitter or both), and follow the steps prompted to sync the accounts.

This is a big step for MySpace, which was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp for $580 million in 2006. Back then, MySpace was the second most popular site on the internet behind Yahoo! and CNN suggested it was worth three or four times more than Facebook, which was “popular mainly with college students”.

That was then, this is now. It’s been abundantly clear for some time that Facebook has won the race to be the dominant social networking site. In some ways this integration helps consolidate Facebook’s position - which was undoubtedly part of the strategy when Facebook adopted an open API. Yet it helps MySpace more and really the site doesn’t have much choice if it wants to remain relevant for its users.

This integration is a pragmatic and sensible move based in the reality of today’s social media landscape.