Facebook’s inexorable march over the realm once dominated by MySpace has been one of the most closely watched developments in digital marketing news over the past decade. Yet following the latter’s relaunch as a content-focused hub in markets around the world, the two former rivals are set to team up and share an unprecedented amount of data.

In 2003, MySpace was seen as the pioneer of social media with a peak user base of 100 million users in the UK alone. However following the launch of Facebook, the former sweetheart of social media has seen its audience share drop to just 3.3 monthly visitors this year, according to figures listed in The Daily Telegraph.

Yet the ailing site has recently taken on a new approach – ‘surrendering’, as the Telegraph puts it, to Facebook’s dominance in the social networking world and instead recreating itself as a “social entertainment destination.” Speaking to the newspaper last week the company’s chief executive, Mike Jones, said the UK site would follow on the heels of the US MySpace, relaunching with a new design focused heavily upon content such as music, TV and film.

It appears that MySpace is determined to make a go of this new strategy and to – for now at least – abandon its once fierce competition with Facebook; the IAB reports that the two firms have entered a new partnership to create MashUp, a service which will allow users to sign into Facebook with their MySpace accounts.

Similarly, it has been claimed that Facebook’s 600 million subscribers will be able to transfer their individual musical, film and celebrity ‘likes’ to MySpace with a single click. On each site using the MashUp service, a user profile is set up and automatically populated using data from the partner site and then begins generating new recommendations.

As part of this deal MySpace will soon begin integrating the Facebook ‘like’ button across its site.

“This new feature is a great illustration of our strategy around social entertainment and enabling the real time stream,” said Mike Jones in a statement. “We feel this is a complementary service to Facebook.”

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