Thoughts On MySpace And Facebook

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.

Pixar's 3D Zoetrope

This is fantastic - would love to see this and can think of loads of uses for it :)



Thanks to Mster on b3ta.com

How Big Is Call Of Duty?

Fantastic infographic on Geekologie (click for larger), outlining just how big Call Of Duty has become.. I must admit, I used to prefer Medal Of Honor, not sure why I've switched - must get the new one. That said, I was one of 6 people I know that got Call Of Duty Black Ops on the day it came out - and I've yet to play the game itself - I've stuck to playing online. Gamertag is PartTimeDave if you want a game. Anyway.

"Within 24 hours, Call Of Duty: Black Ops surpassed previous records to become the largest entertainment launch of all time. But Black Ops is just one of the many successes that the Call Of Duty franchise has obtained in its seven years of existence"

Angry Birds - The Playset

I resisted the urge to get Angry Birds for my iPhone, maybe due the people that were banging on about it were the sort of people that still do quizes and games on Facebook. But during a weak spell in October, seeing it on a friends iPhone (and being a lifetime gamer) I too downloaded it, and got hooked. It's such a simple concept, smashing up those rubbish buildings and knocking over those pigs is soo satisfying!!

It's the biggest selling game on iTunes, available for just 59p, and by August last year it had sold over 6.5million downloads , still topping the most paid app on the store as I type - a more expensive version was made available for iPads has sold over 200k and it's also the biggest selling on the newly launched App Store (Mac OSX 10.6.6 Download available here) so, you can now download it for your desktop too (I'm not going to do this btw).

So, after the t shirts and soft toys comes news from toy maker Mattel at the 2011 International CES that they are to release a physical version of the game in May.. Pictures below from iLounge

Now, this seems a little flawed to me. The cashing in whilst the game remains hot is fine, but a physical version - surely a lot of fun and challenge of the original iPhone game was its unpredictability - the fact that sometimes you think you'd done exactly the same shot as before, only to get different results? (Read this article from Wired "The Physics Of Angry Birds") With a physical game, once the bird hits those fake wooden plastic planks, the whole construction will collapse - and where is the fun in that? Please, friends and family reading - don't buy me this for Christmas 2011, and I've already got Buckeroo.

Update : Read an interview with Angry Bird's Mighty Eagle, Peter Vesterbacka - make of the game (and others) on Tech Crunch here.

Fantastic Music Video - No. 1 (In An Endless Series Hopefully)

Mesmerising video here, no camera trickery, just endless diving into a pool by a huge cast of Chinese divers - although the track is sadly pretty forgettable, it's called "Holiday (So High)" by Sound System. It's a bit like those incredible Ok Go! Video - virally spread around the world, achieving fantastic YouTube views and to my knowledge, not much else.



Discovered on b3ta.com

Amazing Partial Eclipse Image - But That's No Sun Spot!

Astrophotographer Thierry Legault traveled from his native France to the Sultanate of Oman to take pictures of the eclipse - take a closer look though.. that's no sun spot - IT'S A TIE FIGHTER!! Actually, its the International Space Station, hadn't noticed the similarity between the two until about 30seconds ago.

Full image on Discover here

By the way, its *obviously* the International Space Station - if you are on twitter, you can get updates of when the ISS will pass over head to your exact location - no really - follow it here

End Of Music On The High Street

Just over two years ago as the recession really started to bite, Woolworths went into administration - we wrote about it on our Sky News Business blog.

For the music industry, it was a sign.. only a few years earlier, Woolies was THE place to sell singles, and was one of the main distributers of CDs to other shops through its EUK business nationwide. The closure of both businesses also took a few independent record labels out with it.. Zavvi, born out of the Virgin Megastores suffered from EUK's demise, and it soon followed Woolies, leaving tens of thousands out of work. It was clear that people, especially teens, were turning their backs on physical music, opting for digital formats. Now, unless you've been asleep since 2000 (or don't care) none of this should be headline news, but it did leave only one music retailer on the high street, HMV..

So two years on, and just before Christmas HMV published their figures, It made a pre-tax loss of £41.3million in the 6 months to October 2010, compared to a £24.9m loss last year, and they saw a 10% fall in the sale of CDs - on this news, shares slumped by 20% - It sounded like the final nail in the coffin of high street music sales and this was before the heavy December snow.

Today its been announced that HMV will close 40 of its 285 stores over the next 12 months - so that's it for physical music sales in the UK, unless you count the supermarkets - and the danger with them, they only stock records that they *think* are going to sell well. That's fine for Michael Buble, Westlife, Take That and alike - but not really good for music. Singles sell well digitally, albums do not. With nowhere to buy a physical album, sales will slow even further. Only ONE album released in 2010 sold more than a million copies in the UK - Take That's Progress. What about non-mainstream music? Up and coming artists? Acts that aren't signed to major labels with healthy promotional budgets? Who is going to headline the future music festivals?

HMV published their annual Poll Of Polls yesterday - combining the polls from the likes of Q, Mojo, NME, Kerrang!, Uncut, Mixmag, Wire, The Fly, Hot Press, GQ and Time Out as well as online music sites to find out the UK critics albums of the year (I did something similar on a huge Excel Spreadsheet last year, they've saved me the trouble!!) - this list as posted on Record Of The Day here.

What is once again interesting about these polls, is combining them to sales (when I've got the figures I will). Arcade Fire won the poll of polls by a mile - but it has yet to sell 300k records in the UK.

The question is, how many of these albums will you be able to get in the supermarkets?

The BBC is also counting down to its annual acts and artists to watch this year in its Sound Of 2011 - again, how many of these will have albums stocked by Tesco's, Sainsbury's etc?

THE 2010 HMV POLL OF POLLS TOP 50

1. Arcade Fire / The Suburbs
2. The National / High Violet
3. LCD Soundsystem / This Is Happening
4. Beach House / Teen Dream
5. Janelle Monae / Archandroid
6. Vampire Weekend / Contra
7. Yeasayer / Odd Blood
8. Gorillaz / Plastic Beach
9. Caribou / Swim
10. Ariel Pink / Before Today
11. Kanye West / My Beautiful Dark, Twisted Fantasy
12. Joanna Newsom / Have One On Me
13. Gill Scott Heron / I'm New Here
14. Sleigh Bells / Treats
15. Foals / Total Life Forever
16. Villagers / Becoming A Jackal
17. Laura Marling / I Speak Because I Can
18. These New Puritans / Hidden
19. Black Keys / Brothers
20. Deerhunter / Halcyon Digest
21. Hot Chip / One Life Stand
22. Robyn / Body Talk
23. John Grant / Queen Of Denmark
24. Paul Weller / Wake Up The Nation
25. MGMT / Congratulations
26. Avi Buffalo / Avi Buffalo
27. Manic Street Preachers / Postcards From A Young Man
28. Four Tet / There Is Love In You
29. Grinderman / Grinderman 2
30. Robert Plant / Band Of Joy
31. Warpaint / The Fool
32. Big Boi / Sir Luscious Left Foot
33. Flying Lotus / Cosmogramma
34. Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate / Ali And Toumani
35. Broken Bells / Broken Bells
36. Best Coast / Crazy For You
37. Marina and the Diamonds / Family Jewels
38. Oneohtrix Point Never / Returnal
39. Edwyn Collins / Losing Sleep
40. Glasser / Ring
41. Swans / My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope
42. Field Music / Field Music
43. Zola Jesus / Stridulum II
44. Steve Mason / Boys Outside
45. Deftones / Diamond Eyes
46. Plan B / The Defamation Of Strickland Banks
47. Neil Young / Le Noise
48. MIA / Maya
49. Take That / Progress
50. Drums / Drums