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.

The biggest challenge to Cable News Network is not other 24-hour television news stations but social networks like Facebook and Twitter, the president of CNN US said Wednesday.

"The competition I'm really afraid of are social networking sites," Jon Klein said at the Bloomberg BusinessWeek 2010 Media Summit here. "That's an alternative that threatens to pull people away from us.

"The people you're friends with on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information," Klein said. "You click on links they send to you and you trust them.

"Well, we want to be the most trusted name in news," he said. "We don't want the 1,000 people you follow in Twitter to be the most trusted sources for you.

"That's a challenge and we have to rise to that challenge," Klein said.

"So I'm far more worried about the 500 million people on Facebook than I am about two million people watching Fox," the News Corp-owned station which is CNN's major competitor in the cable news arena, Klein said.

The CNN executive said his network's "mission" is to drive social network and other Web users to "link back to something on CNN."

Besides expanding its footprint on the Internet with news and video, CNN is looking at mobile devices, Klein said.

"Online is a big growth area for us, mobile has enormous growth potential and domestic US cable is actually a growth area," he said. "There's a lot of room to grow.