The once mighty MySpace continues to slip, sadly with more redundancies this week and rumours it'll be put up for sale - the site is following in the footsteps of former giants of the Social Web, Friends Reunited, Friendster, and to a lesser extend, Bebo.
To me MySpace was simply a place that those without coding expertise could have a semi decent web presence without paying for a website - it was perfect for unsigned bands, attempting to generate interest from potential fans and labels. For the music industry, it was fantastic at making an artists popularity transparent - the amount of friends and daily plays showed for the first time whether or not there was a genuine demand for that artist, and many a band or artist was signed solely down to this. For a company like ours, the fantastic editorial team at MySpace allowed us to promote our clients on homepages, that would get them infront of millions of eyes - in our internal division of sites, the MySpace Homepage was in the Champions League. MySpace was famously credited for the rise of the Arctic Monkeys - but that's a story for another time.
And then it all started to go wrong. The underlying etiquette of a MySpace user was to add everyone as a friend, whether they knew them or not. Friend Adding software widely available for around $19 would allow you to add hundreds of friends automatically, even allowing you target your market based on gender, age, location etc. Other software allowed you to automatically add comments, and send emails - users inboxes / comments pages became stuffed with spam, from p0rn sites and over eager bands. User profiles became a minefield, lack of HTML coding knowledge and dodgy templates made looking at profiles a danger to both your eyes, and the stability of your browser. MySpace also stopped its applications and videos being embedded elsewhere, and stopped artists using the mail facility to email everyone on their lists - restricting it to 500 people at a time. We advised clients to stick to YouTube, embedding videos on MySpace to increase and focus views to one place. Then we started to notice that the homepage features weren't getting the results we'd expected. Infact, some of them, for well known artists, were getting barely anything at all.
Will Francis tweeted about the MySpace redundancies earlier in the week, posting this by the ex-Editor of MySpace Australia (see extract below). Whereas the rise of Facebook might have started the decline in Australia, I think it was already happening here in the UK - the clean, simple, easy to read, add-only-people-you-know culture Facebook was in a different league, it actually made it fun to communicate with friends in a way that other friends could join in. Anyone remember the "Your Mum Is On Facebook" campaign to highlight how uncool Facebook was? A painting still hangs on MySpace's offices on New Oxford Street. My mum isn't on Facebook, but my Dad is.
Personally, I joined Facebook in November 2006 - initially to help a viral campaign on behalf of a client, and to infiltrate Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth group - it worked - they gave it a seal of approval and sent it out to all the group members, helping the video become one of the most discussed videos of all time. (Before it was taken down due to an incorrect copyright infringement - but that's another story for another time..)
Anyway, back to MySpace. Read the full posting by the ex-Editor of MySpace Australia here
"And then in early 2009, Facebook happened.
For all the talk of the arrogance of upper management, the greed of FOX (and it’s insistence of plastering every page with ads) through to the utter lack of vision by the key stakeholders – the real reason Facebook won, wasn’t because Myspace made errors, it was because it didn’t feel the need to adapt.
Look at the odds against Facebook, Myspace had music, videos, local partnerships, mobile integration, millions of bands, four times as many users, the marketing sway of the FOX media empire, 22 international offices and $900 million in cash from Google.
And Facebook still won out. You can’t deny that is impressive.
But how did they do it? How did they set the sun on what had up until that point been the golden era for MySpace?
They did so in 5 ways and not surprisingly, all of them are product related:
1. The Stream – All your friends activity in one continuous stream, updated every minute.
2. Real Names – Facebook forced you to sign up using your own name, which made it much easier to find people you knew, rather than guess their online nickname.
3. Email Verification - They made you verify your email address, this way you got constant alerts and notifications driving you back to the site.
4. Address Book Importer – Rather than searching for friends, you could import your Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail contacts and instantly be paired with them, in effect shifting your entire network across. If you weren’t registered, they sent you an email alerting you to the fact I’d joined and you should too.
5. Built To Scale – It was designed with one central theme, to be a functional stable social network that would rival all others.
Myspace on the other hand, had no real-time stream. It allowed anyone with a fake name or email address to sign up and the only way you can find your friends on the network, was by manually typing their name in. If they had used the name ‘DanTheMan’ rather than ‘Dan Brown’ there was no way to find them. By the time Myspace had duplicated all the features of Facebook, they’d already lost ¾ of the battle.
The rest then came down to design, usability and marketing. No surprises for who won there.
Myspace was never built to have 110 million users at its peak, purely because founders Tom Anderson & Chris DeWolfe never envisaged it growing so rapidly. Amusingly enough, the ability to actually customize your page was a coding loophole that a user exploited originally. The company then decided to use it as the point of difference in the market. It was that very same ability to customize your profile, which would later become their downfall as millions upon millions of hideous fluro profiles, loaded with dozens of animated gifs crashed browsers around the world."
So what does the future hold for Facebook? Will it go the same way as MySpace, Bebo, and Friends Reunited? David Kirkpatrick thinks its potential is 'unlimited' and I think it'll be highly unlikely, not for a good couple of years anyway,its the second most visited site in the world at the moment, only Google is ahead of it and it has an incredible 500million active users - 70% of those are outside of the US and its still growing, adapting and evolving. I'd love to see it fully integrate with iTunes.
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