At the SocialNotions’ iBreakfast event at UCLA Anderson last week**,  Cristian Cussen of MySpace made a very interesting statement… he said that “MySpace wants to become a Social Portal, as opposed to a Social Network” (paraphrased, obviously).

MySpace Video Director, Cussen, says that MySpace want to become a social portal

In time, what we think of as social nets today will morph into a conglomeration of individualized portals that resemble independent websites more than they do profile pages. These sites will essentially comprise a network within a network (or social portal in Cristian’s parlance) and will be characterized by highly dynamic content created primarily by the owner’s social graph.

A nice example of where I think this is going is the new White House page on MySpace (www.myspace.com/whitehouse):

If you didn’t look at the URL you may never know it was a MySpace page. Pretty neat, huh? But the question is, is the lack of branding and emphasis on independent looking sites a good thing for MySpace or not?

If this is a special case, then forget what I just said. But if, on the contrary, this is where all the pages are going, then in their quest to become a personal social portal, will MySpace run the risk of becoming nothing more than a white-box provider of a highly individualized, social-graph-maintained personal online presence? And if so, so what? Is there another play for the MySpace’s of the world that goes way beyond profile pages?

I think there most definitely is, and you only have to look as far as MySpace Music and MySpace Video to see that, in the long run, there is much much more to MySpace than meets the profile page. Question is, what is Facebook going to do about it?

My prediction? I say watch out for MySpace - with their portal vision and focus on music and video - to figure out social net monetization  in a big way, leaving Facebook scratching their heads as they design yet another page layout to keep up with Twitter.

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**BTW, I’ll be posting a lot more about the iBreakfastLA event in the next couple days…just waiting on the video editors. In short, a GREAT debut for what promises to be an excellent series. Good food, great conversation, top drawer sold-out attendance and exceptional speakers. Don’t miss the next one (focused on mobile apps and marketing) coming your way in late May/early June!