Is MySpace a Portal That Thinks It's a Social Network?

(MoneyWatch)  Almost as if to make up for barely mentioning MySpace in her recent cover story on Facebook, Fortune writer Jessi Hempel wrote a 600-word piece for the publication's Tech Daily last week asking if the News Corp.-owned social net could "get its mojo back." A possible answer is yes, if it ceases to position itself solely as a social network, and spends more energy on, as Hempel describes it, becoming "a playground for music lovers." (You might add in video lovers, as well.)

Little known fact: you don't have to even log in to MySpace to take advantage of its content, and that makes it more of a social network/portal hybrid than a social network, per se. From what I could tell, the first place you could stream U2's new album was MySpace, and so stream away I did over the last few weeks without ever bothering to log in. (No reason to log in, as I have only three MySpace friends.) I couldn't stream the album on Facebook until this week.

Being a social network/portal (maybe we could come up with a new name, like port-net?), also helps it make money. Hempel rightly points out that, MySpace is still "the only site so far to come up with a business model that squeezes substantial revenue out of the site." (The story says it only had $600 million in revenue last year, far below its $1 billion target.) Still, the reason MySpace makes much more money than any other social net is mainly because it is completely unapologetic about making money. That thinking is much more portal than social network.

On top of that, in a recent interview with Charlie Rose (who, hilariously, kept pronouncing the site's name Mah-Space), founders Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe seemed at least as interested in competing with Yahoo and MSN as they did with Facebook, which is what everyone else perceives their competition to be.

There's a mismatch here. MySpace either hasn't committed to portraying itself as it really is, or, the press isn't picking up on what it really is: a massive entertainment portal with strong social networking features as its backbone. What's come to fill the perception gap, because of Facebook's runaway popularity, and MySpace's slowing growth, is that MySpace is a failure for not being more like Facebook. Getting clear about what MySpace is might not bring it back to its glory days, but would go a long way toward giving it some positive differentiation from its perceived rival, that media darling that doesn't make much money: Facebook.