ONETIME RIVALS FACEBOOK AND MYSPACE MAKING NICE

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg revealed that the company is in talks with MySpace about a potential content partnership deal, London’s Telegraph reported. The move could potentially see MySpace music and video streams being shared on Facebook’s Connect platform, which allows people to log into third-party sites using their Facebook IDs.

“Facebook is focusing on building the best technology which helps people share content, while at MySpace they are focusing on more a content-led strategy,” said Sandberg. “We would like to have their content, as we already do with many other sites, shared across our network because it is good for our users. We are open to working with MySpace and are in talks with them at the moment. Owen [Van Natta, MySpace’s CEO) used to work at Facebook and we are still very close to him.”

When asked how the partnership could work, Sandberg explained: “Hypothetically speaking, as nothing has been formally arranged yet, MySpace could become a Facebook Connect partner—which would allow people to share content they liked from MySpace with their Facebook network.”

Van Natta, who was formerly Facebook’s Chief Revenue Officer, acknowledged that the two companies are in talks. “Partnerships are going to be a big part of our strategy moving forward, as a lot of value can be derived from them,” he said. “Facebook is about core communications with your friendship network, whereas MySpace is about congregating around popular content with people who share your interests.”

Since joining MySpace in April, Van Natta has sought to move the site from social networking—an area in which Facebook has soundly trounced its older rival—to “a platform where people socialize around content.” He’s aiming for MySpace to become the place where people find and share music, TV, films and games.

Although MySpace is still one of the most visited websites, with more than 100 million unique users globally, it has had a hard time keeping its existing users and attracting new ones in the last year.

MySpace unveiled a raft of new music features last week at the Web 2.0 confab in San Francisco, including the new MySpace Music Video hub and Dashboard, an analytic tool for bands.