HOWZAT

MySpace, on the other hand, is positioning itself as a more traditional content provider, hoping to drive up audience numbers by assembling a vast range of professionally produced content - TV, music, and film, principally - as well as offering marketers the chance to target adverts more closely.

The site recently announced, for instance, that it was dividing its users among more than a thousand 'groups' according to areas of interest they expressed on their profiles - horror movies, for instance - so that they would see adverts that were more relevant to their interests, an approach it calls 'hyper-targeting'.

"Professional content is a big focus for us," de Wolfe says. "We're doing a lot of licensing deals at the moment, as well as creating two of our own shows."

The site now hosts all of Fox TV and NBC's programming, as well as lot of 'retro' content, including shows from the Seventies such as Charlie's Angels.

By contrast, content is not a word Mr Zuckerberg uses. Asked at a recent web conference whether he expected his company to compete with MySpace on these terms he said that he didn't see Facebook as a traditional media company.

MySpace is generally understood to account for several hundred million of the $800 million (£390 million) revenue reported by Fox Interactive Media (FIM), the digital arm of NewsCorp of which MySpace is a part.

Of that, the majority is display adverts - the banners that appear above and alongside profiles - which are peddled by a growing sales team of 35 in the US and 20 in Europe, followed by search-based adverts. A relatively little used mobile subscription service will soon by phased out by Mr de Wolfe, making the business 100 per cent dependent on advertising.

A growing proportion also comes from overseas. MySpace is now live in 23 countries, including China, and the next countries to roll out - staffed by local management teams who are "immersed in the local culture," Mr de Wolfe says - will be Russia, Poland, and Brazil.

Another item high on Mr de Wolfe's agenda is 'openness' - the ability of platforms like MySpace to incorporate programs - often called applications or 'apps' - from other sites and services. Some of the most popular features on Facebook are apps such as the music recommmendation service iLike, which is written by external developers and incorporated into users' profiles.

MySpace has joined Google's Open Social alliance - designed to encourage open web platforms - and Mr De Wolfe has pledged to make MySpace more accessible to developers, but he admits that the site "hasn't done the best job" of communicating with the software community. "We're now hiring about 40-50 enginreers a month who are going to work on everything from technical infrastructure to developer relations," he says.

The issue of MySpace hosting copyright-infringing content - a problem that has plagued other music and video-based sites, such as YouTube - is also under control, he says, thanks to a 'digital fingerprint' technology which checks every upload to MySpace against a library of copyrigh-protected content.

Mr de Wolfe denies that sites like MySpace, which are at the forefront of a shift towards consumers being able to access music constantly - sometimes for no charge - via the web, are rendering record labels obsolete.

"I think record companies are expanding their core competencies," he says. "They're realising that they're going to have to recoup their investments in more ways than just CD sales, and are starting to leverage more things like ticketing, merchandise and brand sponsorships."

As the web continues to free up the process of distributing music and new methods emerge for fans to discover artists they like, might they one day no longer be necessary?

"While some older acts that have a core following maybe don't need a labels any more, in terms of breaking new acts, I think music companies are going to stay relevant for a long time yet."

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