So today the artist formerly known as MySpace announced their mammoth revamp.  This new direction aims to reposition the site as a hub for social entertainment from all angles: music, movies, TV and celebrities. 

Whilst I haven’t had a chance to play with it myself yet, I have seen the videos, screenshots and interview with CEO Mike Jones and I think Myspace announced a pretty smart move today. They’ve decided that no longer are they going to try and compete on friends or on pure content but try to carve out their own niche at the intersection of the two.

Of course, this isn’t a brand new idea but where Facebook has content elements and someone like Boxee has sharing features, a destination site right in the middle of the two, combining social curation and free-flowing content might just work.  And it leverages arguably their strongest asset - partnerships with big media companies - and matches their strongest demographic - young, media-hungry consumers - with a wider variety of products for the advertisers who are so evidently paying the bills.

It’s a bold move, to be sure, and one that will only be borne out by successful execution.  But they still have tens of millions of users, owners with fairly deep pockets and are still the default place for major label musicians to share their music, even if some sites are digging away at that.  (Incidentally, I think this new strategy is pretty good news for start-ups like SoundCloud who can continue to focus on providing the best experience for anyone to share their sounds to anywhere online, including Myspace itself). 

Maybe it’s all come too late for Myspace to stem the tide of negative perceptions they’ve built up over the last few years but I, for one, think it’s a decent plan. 

Having said all that, the new logo is undeniably stupid.