I remember hearing about MySpace for while before checking it out. When I did finally log into MySpace, it blew my mind. What was this place? This was an online free-for-all! My feed loaded up with hot naked girls, animated gifs, and everyone’s social calendar. There was this cool dude named Tom, who walked you through everything. He was my first friend. I made a profile and suddenly had a bunch of new “friends” welcoming me.
I remember my first post was something about not being in Kansas anymore. No, this felt alive, new and very different. Self expression was encouraged here. You could completely customize your profile, add and delete anything, and for the first time anyone could create their own webpage easily and free. And stay connected via the “news bulletin.” Heck, I would venture to say, if it weren’t for MySpace many people would never have heard of HTML – let alone learned how to code. Tons of sites offered you information on how to make a new MySpace HTML layout, steal someone else’s or add glitter graphics to make your messages stand out.
Here it was, this place for strangers to become friends. It was called MySpace, but it felt like our space to the users. Stalking strangers and friends became acceptable. Now you could cruise humanity from the comfort of home. I could see how many pages views I got or when someone last logged in. Savvy promoters like Tila Taquila spearheaded what would be cool. It wasn’t about having a few friends, it was about having the most friends. Animated gifs of her bootie-bend dance went viral and spread throughout the site, along with a fat girl on a treadmill tripping and nunchuck ninja falling out of a backflip.
The real secret sauce of MySpace was the music (and that hasn’t changed). You never knew what music would greet you as you clicked on a new profile. That could be good and that could be bad. Every band in the world wanted to be your best friend and have you come to their show. It gave bands the ability to really expand their promotions to a wider audience and get discovered by new fans. YouTube was exploding at the same time, and with the ability to upload videos – more entertainment options evolved. Soon everyone from the local radio station, to a big movie star, to pets and the sandwich shop down the street had a MySpace page and wanted to be “friends.” The brands started to come. There were mutterings of other social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, and hi5 cropping up but MySpace was king, period.
And then MySpace blew up, literally and figuratively. It reached the “tipping point” into mainstream, was bought by media giant NewsCorp and they went on a hiring and firing frenzy. Suddenly the place for friends was becoming the place for everything ever. Once NewsCorp had control, what was punk rock about MySpace became forever fractured internally. The creativity of the tech teams got tied down and big bureaucracy weighed in on decisions. But they couldn’t move fast enough to keep up with the start-ups. It was a cluster muck. Small rogue teams developed working on projects that got buried in the site, and open internal communication stopped. New departments formed every week and new teams became bloated and infused by yet more newer teams. The vision and leadership was cloudy to all.
For us users, well, it was getting out of hand too. The rich media ads were so crazy. If you accidentally rolled over something they popped out and started playing. It was so busy, it was hard to focus on anything. For advertisers getting their toes wet in the social space it was expensive, really expensive to buy in. It felt like everyone was screaming for your attention. And the site got slow. So slow. The servers kept going down. You would lose stuff. It was overrun with promotions and advertising. There was too much spam. Too much hacking. Too many fake profiles and celebrities. Too many bots. The conversations stalled. A new site called Facebook was getting hyped. It was exclusive. Only college students could join at first. And it was totally different.
Facebook was super simple and clean-looking. Here you shared stuff. You only connected to people you actually knew. You couldn’t customize your profile much, but you could have more meaningful and insightful exchanges with people you really wanted to talk to. There were silly games, quizzes and dating options. The live feed was much more robust, updated every single minute and allowed no HTML to clutter or bog down the site. It felt like our site again. Instead of getting lost in massive friends, you shared a common real friend with people, and therefore real interests. It was not about having the most friends, it was about talking to your friends. Emails alerting you to new activity kept you involved.
And soon my time on MySpace dwindled. What was the point? I changed my MySpace profile status update to say “I am on Facebook” and deserted Tom and the rest of them for greener pastures. #MySpaceFail! My profile, like many others, became frozen in time due to inactivity. MySpace became a reminder of what once was, but is no more – a profile ghost town.
Forget music, or naked photos, or animated gifs, or annoying ads, or promoters and bands because Facebook was the water cooler of conversations and it didn’t have any of that nonsense. On Facebook you had to get real. Facebook wanted you to have only one profile, the more real version of you. Maybe the grown-up version? The address book importer made it easy to find your friends. The secret sauce to Facebook was sharing. You could share in a more personal way. A limited way. You could not spam everyone all day. You could send cards, presents, and hugs. You could play games together, you could start memes and you could choose your apps. Instead of expressing your feelings with an emoticon, you could update your status. Advertisers could not do a homepage takeover on Facebook, but they could create a relationship with consumers by actually responding to them.
Facebook also stayed open source. It was scalable, poised to grow. It paid attention to the users and never had to give up control to a giant corporation, allowing it to evolve and move quickly. Facebook didn’t cater to the masses, opting instead to roll-out new features without consent. Deal with it people. It also allowed groups of protest to be formed, and some tweaks to the changes, if reasonable, would follow. It pushed social media into a sharable state. You could share anything on the web on your Facebook profile via links, photos, or uploading. Soon sites could add Facebook sharable buttons and you could combine your social networks updates together for Twitter and Facebook or sign on with Facebook Connect without filling out forms. The conversations grew even more meaningful and interesting. You couldn’t share anything with MySpace. On your iPhone you could play with the same apps on Facebook that you could play with on your phone. You could self publish on your phone to Facebook. Everything in social tech just sort of fit and worked off each other, and centered around Facebook. Facebook was reliable and never went down.
But Facebook made mistakes too. Its Achilles’ heel is privacy. If another site comes forward with more robust privacy, I know I will switch. Sharing information should not be broadcast and picked up by Google or third-party apps unless given specific permission. By defaulting profiles automatically to public, Facebook lost trust with users. By requiring a cell phone number to access features for newer users, it felt too big brother for many.
After a brutal defeat, MySpace finally realized the ship had sailed, they hired a great team of people who “got it” to turn the ship around. In one year, they have tried, really tried to do this and have accomplished leaps and bounds. But is too late? New streamlined profiles have been introduced, a new homepage launched, a new logo created, curators of information hired, sharing enabled and new apps like the mobile app “SuperPost” created to promote sharing. MySpace is now syncing with Facebook in some ways, and allows Twitter status updates which has brought new activity to dead profiles, but not necessarily user logins. They are trying to cut through the clutter to create simple ad space, but are contractually bound to the ads they have previously sold. MySpace already lost the market. Brands are now on Twitter and Facebook, but not MySpace. MySpace has one saving factor and that is music. The music community is alive and well. There are still eyeballs that attract the advertisers and still potential for MySpace with users. However, timing is everything and MySpace may just run out of time.
By: D. Bandini
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