Om Malik over on GigaOm seems to confuse office politics at MySpace with the demise of the social network.

Rupert Murdoch’s $580 million MySpace purchase has outlived not only its utility, but has also finally hit its expiration date. That last step came with the announcement this afternoon that Owen Van Natta was stepping down as chief executive of the company. This was nine months after he joined the Los Angeles-based venture. It’s circling the drains, if you ask me.

Changes in leadership do not mean MySpace is dead. It’s still a very large business with many users. It’s not going away anytime soon.

As one of the commenters on Mr Malik’s post pointed out:

If you check the most recent comscore, MySpace has grown 2 months in a row, and is back up to 120MM users worldwide. That may not sound huge compared with Facebook’s 350MM, but it is still 2X twitter’s audience, and blows almost any other site out of the water. We in Silicon Valley tend to think that when something is not hockey-sticking anymore than it is dead. That is not true. If MySpace lost 1MM users a month it would take 10 years to disappear. That still gives them some time to figure out what to do.

Brian Zisk, co-founder of Collecta, a real-time search engine, recently pointed out that the MySpace message stream is five times the volume of Twitter.

The demographics of MySpace are different from Facebook and Twitter. It mostly attracts a young teenage audience and it has become a very large music site, and music fan site.

MySpace remains a large and viable business. It is far from being dead.