Van Natta, who has long aspired to run a consumer Internet startup, is an obvious choice. Having fallen out of favor with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's fickle 24-year-old CEO, he is spending his exile running a music startup, called Project Playlist, out of an office building shared with Facebook. While Van Natta has managed to extricate Playlist from some of its legal troubles with the music labels, it hardly seems like a gig that encompasses his ambitions. Having worked for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos as well as Zuckerberg, Van Natta seems capable of dealing with a testy owner-CEO like Rupert Murdoch.

Calacanis, meanwhile, has no qualifications for the job. He tanked his first media company, then sold his second one, Weblogs Inc., for $25 million to AOL, where he accomplished nothing of note after the acquisition. He's since raised far too much money for Mahalo, a Web 2.0 rehash of Yahoo's 1995-era Web directory. Silicon Alley Insider thinks he should be MySpace's new CEO because he worships Jon Miller, the former AOL CEO who played mentor to him before Miller was fired and Calacanis quit. Ever the clever fameball, Calacanis is playing coy and saying "No comment" as loudly as possible.

Miller now runs News Corp.'s Internet operations, so he's the one to pick DeWolfe's successor. We have a suggestion: Hire both! Van Natta can do the hard work of fixing MySpace. While he's affable enough, he hardly seems to crave attention.

Tom Anderson, DeWolfe's sleazy sidekick at MySpace, is every MySpace user's first friend when they sign up. He needs a replacement, too. Why not replace him with Calacanis, the ultimate Web fameball, who seems to measure his self-worth by his number of Twitter followers? He doesn't need any other responsibilities. And as MySpace's Chief Ego Officer, he can still claim to be CEO.

There's an innocent explanation: His digital-music startup, Project Playlist, which recently scored a deal with EMI, has its offices in a downtown Palo Alto building shared with Facebook. But that doesn't explain why our tipster, who spotted Van Natta twice today, saw him walking from that building to another Facebook office. Could be a coincidence. Or it could be that Van Natta, who remains close to Facebook executives like Chamath Palihapitiya and Dan Rose, is up to something.

A group of record labels sued Project Playlist in April — which is, sad to say, the music industry's usual approach to beginning talks. Van Natta has a reputation as a skilled dealmaker, and he led talks with the labels while at Facebook. But sources who have had recent negotiations with labels say they have been granting only short-term licenses for music — typically a year in length. Their strategy is to give startups a year to grow — and then shake them down for most of the profits they generate. Does Van Natta think he can get a better deal? Since he's taking the job, he must be betting on it.