Murdoch On MySpace: "We Screwed Up In Every Way Possible"

Outspoken News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has given a blunt summary of the MySpace debacle, describing the company's attempt at the social networking market as having "screwed up in every way possible." Murdoch took to Twitter to answer "many questions and jokes" about MySpace, which News Corp. acquired back in 2005 for $580m. "[We] learned lost of valuable expensive lessons" the exec admitted.

Having spent over half a billion dollars on MySpace, News Corp. finally sold the social networking site in June last year for a mere $39m. Even that was something of a coup, with average bidding tipped at just $20m to $30m.

This week at CES, MySpace announced a deal with Panasonic to create MySpace TV, a socially-enabled networking system that allows viewers to communicate with friends and strangers about their shared watching experience. An accompanying Myspace Companion App makes suggestions based on your viewing profile. Supporting smartphones, tablets, laptops and the TV screen, MySpace TV even managed to coax Justin Timberlake on-stage to talk up its innovation.

Whether MySpace TV will be enough to turn around the network's failing fortunes – and user numbers – compared to Facebook and Google+ remains to be seen. However it looks like Murdoch has written the whole experience off as a costly lesson as to how the internet can bite back.