OK, it’s 2005. Imagine you are the reigning social media champ, MySpace. You are the number one social networking site and you get all the great press. It appears as if there was no way to stop you. You even get purchased for some serious scratch from one of the premier media companies in the world, News Corp. Sure there are some bothersome startups around like those kids over at Facebook but this is a done deal. You are the king of the mountain. What can go wrong?

Fast forward 5 years. You are a social media also ran. You are white knuckling your existence. Those “kids” over at Facebook have not only passed you but they have basically made you obsolete. You are the butt of social media jokes and no self respecting person or company (unless you are promoting music) talks about their “presence” on your site.

Ah, but there’s a glimmer of hope. Your hopelessly arrogant competition at Facebook has stuck its privacy foot in its mouth and just about every other orifice it can find. Its privacy made it popular but Facebook has gone and pulled the carpet out from underneath its trusted users by making everything public unless you have the guidance to undo the web of privacy options. What do you do?

Well if you are MySpace you go ahead and tout yourself as the social network where privacy matters! As Mashable reports

Facebook is under fire of late as members threaten a mass exodus and NYU students attempt to build an alternative Facebook. Today MySpace is taking its own jab at Facebook by announcing that the social networking site will soon make the default setting for updates “friends only.”

This default privacy change will affect all users who “previously had any granular page setting to ‘friends only,’” but can easily be changed.

The change is part of MySpace’s new public commitment to privacy. The once-dominant social network’s stated goal is to simplify settings and let users more clearly post updates publicly, to friends only, or publicly to anyone 18 or over.

So is this sheer coincidence, utter brilliance or quiet desperation? Probably a little of all of them but I think desperation is in the lead. These “changes” have been discussed in a blog post by MySpace co-president Mike Jones but guess what? They won’t actually be available for a few weeks.

Well, either they figure that we are dumb as dirt and won’t see the opportunistic media play that is not supported by reality or they just got real lucky with this new “policy” over at MySpace. Hmmmmm, I wonder which one it is?

As I write this I wonder if this was even worth the time to mention. Maybe it shows just how lame this industry can be and that’s what makes it interesting. Either that or in the deep recesses of everyone’s minds, even those over at MySpace, we hope that there will someday be an alternative to Facebook because the whole “ask for forgiveness, rather than permission” policy of Facebook is growing old…..real old.

Can anyone say Diaspora?