MYSPACE has begun courting videogame developers as it moved to capitalise on the booming popularity of playing games online at social networks.

"We initially embraced games a few years back with a gaming platform but at the end of the day it was fairly isolated in certain parts of MySpace,''

MySpace co-president Mike Jones told AFP at a Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

"MySpace is going to put as much weight behind games as we put behind music.''

After being eclipsed by online social networking star Facebook, MySpace (owned by News Corp, the parent company of the publisher of news.com.au) made itself into an internet community for people who make or love music.

MySpace sees its prime demographic as internet users between the ages of 14 and 36.

The social network claims more than 100 million users, about 30 per cent of whom rack up about a total of a billion minutes of online game play each month.

Mr. Jones believes that by better weaving online games into the fabric of the online community those figures can be doubled to 60 per cent of MySpace users logging more than two billion minutes of play monthly.

MySpace is striving to reclaim lost glory and expand its popularity in a social networking world dominated by Facebook, which boasts more than 400 million users.