The Social

So should News Corp. buy Twitter? That's what Vanity Fair columnist and pundit Michael Wolff speculated this week in an article on Newser.com, the aggregation site he founded.

"There may not be anything less than Twitter that can distract Wall Street from News Corp.'s stubborn and, at this point, unnatural newspaper fetish," Wolff wrote, "and, as well, convince it, for one last hurrah, that (CEO Rupert Murdoch) isn't...well, gone."

The catalyst for Wolff's recommendation was the recent hire of former AOL chief Jon Miller as head of News Corp.'s digital projects. Miller's venture capital experience would make him an ideal candidate to spearhead an aggressive M&A strategy, and there's no more buzzworthy company than Twitter these days. On the flip side, there really isn't an obvious fit for it within the company, and Twitter still has yet to produce a viable strategy for long-term profits.

Wolff, who wrote this year's Murdoch biography "The Man Who Owns The News," got a whole lot of tech blog attention for insisting in an interview that "MySpace is for f***ing cretins" and predicted a swift doom for the social network. In Monday's brief Newser piece, he called Murdoch "the world's least savvy Internet guy" and said that News Corp. has "run (MySpace) into the ground" since acquiring its parent company Intermix Media for $580 million in 2005.

There are some holes in his argument, to say the least. With the help of News Corp.'s big-media muscle, MySpace was able to launch its MySpace Music joint venture last year, and while it certainly made a few missteps that led to Facebook eclipsing it in worldwide traffic, it's not quite time to stick a fork in it. User engagement is better than Facebook's, ComScore found, and it's had better luck with advertising than Facebook has.

But Wolff may have added motives to want to rip into News Corp.'s digital strategy and suggest that the long-shot possibility that it would buy Twitter is its only clear path to dot-com salvation. His beef with News Corp. has turned into a full-out feud, and the Page Six gossip section of the Murdoch-owned New York Post has recently been making a big deal of his personal life--always getting in a jab about his lack of hair. Ouch.

Michael Wolff, whose new, lascivious Rupert Murdoch bio The Man Who Owns The News has taken the New York media industry by storm, stirred up some social-networking class warfare in an interview Monday with BusinessWeek's Jon Fine.

"If you're on MySpace now, you're a (expletive) cretin. And you're not only a (expletive) cretin, but you're poor," said Wolff, whose previous book Burn Rate chronicled dot-com excess in the late '90s and who openly attests to hating the word "blog."

"Nobody who has beyond an eighth grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people," added Wolff, who is also the founder of Newser.

Fine pointed out, "If you are in a band, you are on MySpace. You have to be on MySpace. That's a powerful driver." He's right. "And second of all--if I am to accept your reasoning, even though I don't--as the success of The Sun (a News Corp.-owned British tabloid) will tell you, there are lot of cretins out there and you can make a lot of money off cretins."

Let's get past the language: MySpace did indeed start as a hub for independent music fans. Facebook began as an exclusive directory for Harvard students and expanded to the other Ivies before finally opening to the public. MySpace encourages glitter text; Facebook mandates that members must use their real names. So Wolff is alluding to a legitimate point, but he makes it in the bluntest of terms.

And as Fine notes, there's the money issue. MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe recently expressed concern about the site's revenue growth slowing down amid the recession, but MySpace is still the flagship property of the top destination for display ads on the Web--Fox Interactive Media. Facebook, meanwhile, is still seen as an experimental ad medium.

MySpace, additionally, has trumpeted the buying power of its members with the likes of a high-profile campaign by luxury jewelry brand Cartier earlier this year.

But I'll give Wolff some credit: he sure knows how to drum up controversy.

From left to right: Chris DeWolfe, Rupert Murdoch, John Battelle

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET Networks)

Recently, rumors have been flying over whether or not MySpace would use this week's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco as a venue for announcing a developer platform akin to Facebook's. Well, now we have a final answer: sort of.

MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch took the stage at Web 2.0 and confirmed that the company is working on a platform that will launch "within a couple of months." But when no date's given, expect delays: considering how long we ultimately waited for Windows Vista (and now, Apple's OS X Leopard) this could mean the MySpace platform is even further off than we think. And the company did say that it won't be open to all users immediately, with a "sandbox" of one or two million beta testers preceding its full launch.

In the meantime, the company will be creating a central directory of embeddable HTML widgets, and the site's privacy controls will be growing more extensive.

The whole announcement is interesting, considering that over the past few months MySpace has been announcing original programming, hosting concert tours and partnering with record labels, making some observers (like this one) wonder whether the social network was veering away from the Facebook model and would be diving into the role of a pop-culture hub--which former leader MTV, with its newfound penchant for reality shows about rich kids, has largely vacated.

But with a somewhat premature announcement about a developer platform, MySpace has made it clear that while the site enjoys a traffic and membership advantage over Facebook, it's still following in its fast-growing rival's footsteps when it comes to technology.

Facebook, meanwhile, was represented at the Web 2.0 Conference by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose conversation with event organizer John Battelle of Federated Media kicked off the summit. Zuckerberg, notorious for ducking questions, said that an initial public offering is "years off." In other news, its massive financing round is under way and near completion.

And having extra investor cash is particularly important for Facebook--a report from the Silicon Alley Insider highlighted an eyebrow-raising Zuckerberg soundbite of "we don't focus on optimizing the revenue." Ouch. Luckily, the 23-year-old CEO also said that an improved advertising system is on its way.

TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld commented that "Zuckerberg has already mastered the technique of saying nothing, while still hinting at the endless possibilities before him."