What MySpace-Facebook Rivalry?
October 20, 2007
Into the wee hours of the morning on Oct. 18, News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace treated Silicon Valley’s elite to a very L.A.-style party at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Thumping deejay beats, swirling lights, barely clad blonde models, and an open bar greeted Bay Area bloggers, geeks, venture capitalists, and the wunderkinder running successful Web 2.0 startups.
The message was clear: MySpace is on the move northward. Beverly Hills-based MySpace, the world’s biggest social network, is opening a Silicon Valley office and plans to hire hundreds of Valley engineers, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch and MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe had said earlier at a conference. What’s more, Murdoch and DeWolfe said they’ll make it easier for software developers everywhere to create applications for MySpace, a move made to much acclaim by rival Facebook in May.
Those were among the few nuggets of news emanating from O’Reilly Media’s annual Web 2.0 Summit, which also featured Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said as little as possible about reports he’s lining up financing that could value his company at upwards of $10 billion (BusinessWeek.com, 10/17/07). 
