It looks like News Corp. is sick of getting its butt whooped by Facebook. The media conglom is shaking up its social networking site MySpace, hiring former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta as its new CEO, and former Sling Media president and MTV chief digital guru Jason Hirschhorn as chief product officer. (Van Natta comes to MySpace after a brief stint as CEO of Playlist.com.) Add to that the hire of AOL senior vice-president Michael Jones as chief operating officer, and it suggests some interesting moves are afoot at MySpace.

Using the words Sling Media (makers of the Slingbox), MTV and AOL in the same sentence hints MySpace is thinking about content and delivery. Marry that with the social savvy of Facebook, and it’s hard not to conclude MySpace is thinking of reinventing itself as something more than a place for teens to massage their ego.