I recently received my monthly email newsletter from MySpace. And that’s about how often I interact with MySpace these days, once a month not on the site, but via its newsletter.

Raise your hand if you visited your MySpace profile today? In the past week. Past month? Six months? I don’t see a lot hands up out there. How many of you even have a MySpace account? Wow, even fewer hands!

Don’t feel bad, you’re not alone. Lately Myspace has been going the way of — gasp — the newspaper! Millions no longer find the site relevant and have found a new online lover — Facebook!

It’s gotten so bad for MySpace that it is seriously considering entering a corporate partnership with Facebook

Wow!

But before MySpace officially begins sleeping with the enemy it now says it’s going to reinvent itself as a home for music and entertainment enthusiasts. But Facebook is also amping up its music offerings so I’m not sure how much success MySpace can expect.

Focusing on one or two niche areas such as music and entertainment generally wouldn’t be considered a bad web business strategy. But let’s be clear, the corporate chiefs behind MySpace never intended for the site to evolve into a niche player in the social networking game. The (financial) expectation for MySpace was much higher than for it to be a bit player.

How did this happen? How did MySpace lose its social media mojo. It would be easy to blame the defections on fickle web consumers who seem ever ready to jump from one web fad to the next. Anybody remember Friendster?

MySpace is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. No one can seriously believe that when  Murdoch paid $600 million dollars for MySpace four years ago he expected MySpace to so quickly fall out off the social media radar.

As most know Murdoch owns Fox News and a ton of other media holdings around the world. By all  objective accounts Murdoch has built a hellava old school media empire. On the flip side, he’s tanking with pretty much all of his Internet and social media based media companies, especially MySpace!

Three years ago MySpace boasted 100 million users . Today that number has been cut in half. Each month the news gets worse as the former king of the social media hill sheds users at an accelerated pace.

In fact it was just last year that Murdoch predicted it would be Facebook eating MySpace’s dust, not the other way around.

I’ve never taken acid, but for the past year or so whenever I would find a reason to log onto MySpace I always felt like I was experiencing multimedia sensory overload as I waded through a psychedelic cyber trip to nowhere.  For me it’s never been a fun high using MySpace. In the end MySpace failed to create an engaging, interactive, or inviting enviroment where people and groups wanted to stick around — a major social networking no-no.

Murdoch’s biggest mistake is he tried to turn new media MySpace into an extension of his existing old media operations. He wants MySpace to be Fox News and the Wall Street Journal (subscription required). Not in an overt political or editorial sense but in terms of creating new media revenue streams using old school media pay models

Here’s the lesson all corporate media types need to takeaway from the MySpace free fall: Stop trying to make the Internet, specifically social media, be and act like TV and newspapers. You build value online by building an audience bound by common interests. You can’t keep trying to hit everyone over the head with the same marketing and advertising messages used in legacy media and transfer them online.

The Internet doesn’t operate the same way as print and  TV or cable. Most media execs are slowly figuring this out. The news and information consuming public certainly has. I think Murdoch knows it as well, but just doesn’t care.

Further proof of his foolhardy web stratedgy have been recent declerations that Hulu, the popular web video site he partly owns, may soon no longer be free. He also thinks search engines, websites and blogs should begin paying for content originally created by his many media companies. He’s even got the Associated Press beleiving that charging websites a fee would be a good idea.

The public has voted. They aren’t going to pay for news on websites. But as I’ve written before, there’s a lot of money to be made in Free.

Here’s the lesson all corporate media types — especially Rupert Murdoch — need to takeaway from the MySpace free fall: Stop trying to make the Internet, specifically social media, be and act like TV and newspapers. You build value by building an audience bound by common interests. You can’t keep trying to hit everyone over the head with the same marketing and advertising messages.