Very quickly – and some would say very sadly – former social networking giant MySpace has crumbled into the veritable joke of the online social world it once dominated.
Having been purchased in 2006 by Newscorp for a hefty price of $580 million, the once-supreme ruler of social networking will be lucky to sell for $30 million, according to some industry estimates.
Although it is unclear if – or how – MySpace can ever regain its lost luster, what’s much easier to determine, says former Facebook President and Napster co-founder Sean Parker, is why MySpace fell from its once lofty perch atop the digital social kingdom.
“The failure to execute product development,” Parker says is among the chief reasons for MySpace’s demise. “They weren’t successful in treating and evolving the product enough, it was basically this junk heap of bad design that persisted for many many years. There was a period of time where if they had just copied Facebook rapidly, they would have been Facebook. They were giant, the network effects, the scale effects were enormous.”
Parker goes on to credit the ingenious move of targeting college kids for Facebook’s eventually market dominance, “Facebook entered the market through college and the reason we went in through college was that college kids were generally not Myspace users. College kids were generally not Friendster users …”
According to TechCrunch, which covered Parker’s interview with Jimmy Fallon at the NExTWORK Conference in New York, no can definitively count out MySpace just yet.
“It’s never the end game. Facebook is now a platform upon which all kinds of applications are being built it’s definitely not it,” Parker says. “It would be incredibly presumptuous and self-serving of me to believe that Facebook was the end of history. The only way it could possibly be the end of history is if it becomes some sort of artificial super intelligence that takes over the world.”
MySpace was also to quick to start monetizing the site. Where Facebook did not have advertising on their site at first, then rolled out slowly. MySpace, began junking up the site with advertising before they had the loyal, mainstream following. You can bearly go to a web site or blog without the FB Like or Tweet button…MySpace was not able to stay the course long enough for rest of the world to help make it an "everyone" solution.
Myspace is old, Facebook is getting old. Twitter and Tumblr is where it is at.
To be frank, Twitter, as a platform, is losing steam, as well, and Tumblr is nothing more than a variation on multiple other blog sites. Nothing extraordinary or forward-looking about that service. The future, imo, will be developing in mobile and will re-vision the way info is shared between people. I don't see it as being device or platform specific (i.e., it won't be IOS, Android, etc. specific, but agnostic), and it will better capture the social aspects of location/mobility. There are a number of early revs that people have already seen (4square, etc.), but these are merely toe dips into the water in terms of what a fully realized service will be.
I should note that Twitter, as a communication method/medium, may remain quite viable, as the beauty in its design is its simplicity (i.e., it took the tried but true IM/Text paradigm and took it from narrowcast to broadcast, thus making it the perfect social vocalization tool). As we've already seen, many different tools use Twitter as the way to broadcast its activity (moreso than Facebook), and that function will remain an ingredient in almost any future service. Will it still be called Twitter? I don't know; if Twitter keeps trying to close its walls and eliminate variation, then maybe not. If it remains an open and extensible function (rather than a form) it will remain.