Makeover for Myspace users' pages

MySpace's new co-presidents are making changes to the News Corp-owned social-networking site, reducing clutter on users' profile pages and expanding music, movie and game features.

Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, promoted last month with the departure of Owen Van Natta, said they are returning MySpace to its roots by fostering interaction around entertainment. New offerings will be introduced in stages over the next year, they said.

"Incrementally, not with one switch of the light, over the next six, nine and 12 months, there's going to be a remarkable transformation of MySpace," Hirschhorn said at their office in Beverly Hills, California.

The pair said they are focused on maintaining the site's 100 million global users, before trying to win back people who moved to Facebook. They said they've revamped product-development to create tools that help users discover and share entertainment content.

"The product wasn't on par with some of the competitors," Hirschhorn said. "We did not do a great job of making it a usable place."

The two executives said they are working on a new advertising deal to replace the US$900 million ($1275 million) multiyear partnership with Google that expires in June. MySpace is talking with several partners, including Google, about striking a new search agreement or split search among more than one provider, Jones said. He declined to discuss specifics.

In the US, MySpace fell to 69.7 million users in January from 75.6 million a year earlier. Facebook more than doubled to 112 million users, according to ComScore Inc.

The new look of profile pages will start as early as next month for musicians, and will expand to all users later in the year, Hirschhorn said. The new movie section within MySpace will let users watch previews, interviews with actors or take quizzes related to films.

- BLOOMBERG