By Emma Barnett, Technology and Digital Media Correspondent

Published: 5:09PM GMT 10 Mar 2010

While both executives refused to be drawn on the reasons surrounding Mr Van
Nattas sudden
exit, they admitted that they would now be innovating at an
accelerated pace. It was felt that Mr Van Natta had failed to develop and
implement new services quick enough, according
to a senior digital source close to the company who spoke to The
Telegraph at the time.

We have not changed strategy dramatically, as we were both key leaders in
developing the companys vision with Owen. Now we want to move on those
ideas at a pace never seen before. We have a more refined focus on content
and social discovery and are accelerating the product development around
that vision, Mr Hirschorn said.

Over the next few months, the two chiefs will oversee the gradual roll out of
several new products and tools across the social network which has been
losing users to rival sites such as Facebook and Twitter over at a fast pace
over the last two years.

Some of the most recent Nielsen figures speak for themselves in the UK in
January 2010, MySpace had 3.9 million unique users compared to the mighty
23.9 unique users visiting Facebook during the same month. Even in the US
where MySpace has always been historically bigger, 51.6 million unique users
visited MySpace last month versus a whopping 116.3 million using Facebook.

Mr Hirschorn explained the difference between MySpace and Facebook as:
MySpace is a not place for people to talk about what they are up to. Its
the place people talk about what they are into.

As part of this increased focus around content
discovery and sharing, MySpace will be rolling out a recommendation
engine which will suggest games, music and videos to users based on their
previous consumption habits. This has already gone live for new users, but
will be fully rolled out to those with existing MySpace accounts over the
next two months.

There will also be a revamp of all users profiles, starting next month with
all music artists with a MySpace presence. According to Mr Jones this will
improve the video and audio capabilities of profiles, creating more of a
next generation environment. It will also offer artists more opportunities
to use their profiles to set up things like competitions for fans. MySpace
is working with the music industry at the moment about how to best develop
its services for artists. Regular MySpace users will then have these
opportunities extended to them and their profiles. There will be automations
tools to help people migrate their old profiles over with greater ease.

The dashboard
tool, which was made available to musicians last year, is to be extended to
regular users at an unconfirmed point during the summer. This free tool
currently allows all artists and labels unlimited access to charts, graphs
and snapshots of MySpace music data relating to the profiles and regularity
of their listeners.

The artists dashboard data shows musicians where their fans come from, which
songs are being played the most, profile views, friend count and the number
profile visitors. Trending data are available for seven day and 30 day
glances and there is also heat map showing usership.

The user dashboard will let people know how many times their link to a video
or song, has been re-shared and how their presence on the site is doing
generally. This will then lead to users being awarded points or
reputation badges depending on their levels of influence on the site. Mr
Hirschorn said that people not only want to connect when using a network but
they also enjoy getting credit for sharing or curating information.

The co-presidents are prioritising social games as part of the revamp and hope
to make it as popular as music has been as a genre across the site.
Presently they say 20 per cent of their users are connecting with games on
a daily basis and they want that to be up to 50 per cent in the near future.
Today at Games Developers Conference in San Francisco MySpace executives
are announcing a few new social games which are exclusive to MySpace and are
releasing several APIs which will allow third party developers to create
games for MySpace. They will also be releasing a mobile micro application
for MySpace gamers across a number of platforms which will allow people to
receive games alerts.

Mr Jones also discussed MySpaces mobile plans: Mobile is our largest growth
segment. We are aiming to release 20 to 30 micro apps in the next year,
across the major phone platforms [Android, iPhone, BlackBerry] which will
each offer small parts of the MySpace functionality.

By also making certain APIs available, third party developers can use certain
parts of our content to create very specific apps.

Both presidents are focussed on making sure MySpaces recovery is
product-led but have deliberately staggered the changes because they say
their userbase is very sensitive to change.

When asked about how they plan on going about the difficult task of
re-capturing lost users who have left MySpace for the likes of Facebook, Mr
Hirschorn said: We still have 100 million users worldwide and at the moment
our focus is on making the MySpace experience good for them and then once we
have stabilised that userbase we will go out and win back the users which
have left.

Mr Jones added: We are impatient to bang the drum for MySpace, but want to
wait for the product to be up to speed. We are aiming to go on a huge
marketing push by the latter portion of this year.

I am confident we will be able to win users back and attract brand new ones
because of the nature of the internet. Usage patterns change very quickly
and I have no doubt that when we want to turn on the viral effect back on
we can do so very quickly and with great effect. And secondly, when we are
ready for our comeback, because we are owned by News Corp, we will have a
very loud voice shouting about us around the world.

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk