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Facebook & Myspace Teaming Up?

What seems like a bizarre move, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, told The Telegraph, a British newspaper that Facebook and MySpace are in talks about teaming up and letting users share videos and music content.  This would also mean, that users could sign into their MySpace using their Facebook account information. 

Sandburg said to The Telegraph, “Facebook is focusing on building the best technology which helps people share content, while at MySpace they are focusing on more a content-led strategy. We would like to have their content, as we already do with many other sites, shared across our network because it is good for our users.”

Sandburg went further on to say that they are working very closely with Owen Van Netta, MySpace’s chief executive, who had left his chief revenue officer position earlier this year at Facebook.  Just a few weeks ago, Van Netta had said MySpace no longer wants to be Facebook’s competition, and that they will be changing the focus of the site more to an entertainment based website, offering music and video, rather than a social networking site. 

There would be a few benefits for MySpace if the two did team up.  MySpace is home to one of the largest selections of music and videos on the Internet. If users were able to share music or video onto Facebook, it would not only add to the amount of views or listeners of the content, but get Facebook users to possibly reconsider keeping or sign up again for their MySpace accounts and have it another place to share media content. 

Some say there could be a few risks, including Mashable‘s Adam Ostrow.

Although MySpace may envision itself as an entertainment portal, its bread and butter is still its social network – diminished as it may be. Encouraging members to use Facebook for sharing content could hasten its demise in social networking at a rate far exceeding its growth in music and entertainment.

The result of that would be even more domination by Facebook, which, it should be noted, is already starting to move into digital music on its own (and already serves as a major distribution point for YouTube content as well).

The digital music service Ostrow mentions, is a new gift service powered by Lala, where Facebook users are able to send a web song to one of their friends for as little as $0.10, which is eventually expected to bring in quite a profit for both Facebook & Lala. No word from Facebook or MySpace if they would charge users to share music or video with their friends.