Debate: What’s the Reason For MySpace’s Decline?

Re:Debate: What’s the Reason For MySpace’s Decline? by jinushaun on Thursday March 31, 2011 @10:09AM (#2391599)

Debate? What debate? MySpace was always a fad that was waiting for something better to come along. It follows the same fate as LiveJournal and Friendster. Facebook out-smarted, out-strategised, out-performed and out-visioned MySpace and its News Corp owner. The site sucked from a visual and experience perspective, and was completely unstable during its peak. Facebook's strategy of real names, real identity, real relationships and expanding out from colleges beat MySpace's strategy of letting sleazy 31 year olds chase 13 year olds--both using fake identities and whose profile page featured obnoxious animation and music. MySpace was a wild west of junk, but no actual "social networking" happening at huge scale. It was always superficial--a glorified hot or not.

MySpace is and always has been an entertainment portal littered with ads that were as obnoxious and their users' people pages. The user experience worsened following the News Corp buyout.

Facebook, OTOH, has always been about real identities and real relationships. Its design, compared to MySpace, made it feel like a tool instead of a toy. As a result, the content on Facebook has greater value and feels more legitimate. Everyone is familiar with the dating term "Facebook official". That's the power of Facebook. Facebook went beyond the primitive social networking elements of "moods" (status updates), walls and photo sharing. They became the de facto Identity Provider on the Internet.

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Re:Debate: What’s the Reason For MySpace’s Decline? by chris_j on Thursday March 31, 2011 @01:34PM (#2392580)

I agree that Myspace sucked from a visual and experience perspective. It's easy to see why Facebook killed it. When Facebook came along, it was a welcome relief from the garish graphics and "Thanks for the ad!!!1" wall posts.

The real question here is not "What was it about Myspace, the site, that sucked?" though. The question is "What was it about Myspace, the organisation, that prevented it from fixing its sucky site?" It's probably safe to speculate that Myspace, the organisation, knew that their site sucked and that Facebook's site was better. What held them back from fixing it? Was it clueless management, lack of talented developers or the decision to use a particular technology that doomed them? I don't think that the recent debate has cleared that one up yet.

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