technoballs

It doesn’t seem to take much for the digital press to slam MySpace these days. First, concerns about the usability of MySpace Music. Then the highly-publicized ousting of founder Chris DeWolfe. Insert layoff. Then, the recent announcement that new CEO Owen Van Natta had been sacked. And against all of this, the steady, exploding phenomena that is Facebook’s gravity-defying growth.

TechCrunch was on-hand at MySpace’s recent company meeting, and reports on the social networking giant’s new plan:

MySpace’s go forward vision was presented to employees, say our sources, and it was all about a single feature thrust that they’re calling “Discovery.”

The idea is to hit users over the head with new stuff when they come to MySpace… If they get this right, the thinking goes, people will want to visit the site over and over again to see what new stuff they can do.

This is effectively a recommendation engine around new content, says one source, but MySpace doesn’t want people calling it that.

A reco engine is MySpace’s deus ex machina? This could prove tricky, as many observers have noted that who a person says he or she is on MySpace may have little resemblance to who they are in real life. How can MySpace hope to effectively unearth its users’ preferences when it cannot verify much factual information about them? (The counter-argument to this is that, regardless of who I say I am on MySpace, I reveal my true preferences through the multimedia content I consume. Tracking my “digital fingerprints” this way may eliminate the need for greater identify verification.)

I hope MySpace finds its mojo on this one, but hearing astute observers like TechCrunch describe this new strategy as a “Hail Mary” play does not inspire confidence.

via MySpace’s Hail Mary Strategy: “Discovery”.