News Corp. seems poised to do to MySpace.com what the producers of "Inferno" did to Lindsay Lohan and drop the dead weight like a toxic relationship.
In an interview with Reuters, Chase Carey, COO of News Corp., the media conglomerate owned by Rupert Murdoch, says that his company is open to selling the beleaguered/irrelevant site.
Murdoch bought Myspace in 2005 for $580 million and it reportedly directly caused a $156 million operating slump in News Corps' digital media sector last quarter.
However, the once-mighty MySpace, now known as "My__," underwent a revamp earlier this month that has, Carey says, turned it into a marketable property and a lot more likely to get some bids.
Taking a cue from Sun Tzu, Myspace wisely realized it could not compete with its primary rival, Facebook, and reinvented itself as a multimedia hub rather than a social media site. MySpace had 60 million views in October to Facebook's 150 million.
One possibility Gawker floats is that Google, which forged a lucrative MySpace ad deal with News Corp. in 2006, could pick up the site. Unfortunately, the search engine is mired in its own social media mess thanks to delays of its "Google Me" network. The top-secret project was thought to be Facebook's direct rival, though later reports from the company debunked those rumors. However, Mashable's Ben Parr writes, there seem to be problems with "the design, purpose and execution" of Google Me. Kind of a deal breaker.
"Saturday Night Live" helps new users set up their MySpaces at "The Learning Annex:"
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