Here’s the story:
Truly, the end of an era.
Anyway the most surprising thing about this is that MySpace still had 400 employees.
What is Facebook currently valued at? I wonder if it will someday be overtaken in popularity by a newer site?
Oh, and I read about the 400 employees and was pretty shocked too.
Google Plus perhaps?
Just goes to show how ethereal and pretty much arbitrary the valuations of these sites are. From $1 BN to a paltry $35 MM in the span of what, 7-8 years?
It’s my fault, I closed my account a few days ago. Sry.
For some perspective:
Exxon: $390b
Apple: $310b
Microsoft: $$217b
Intel: $110b
Goldman Sachs: $66b
Ford: $50b
$70 billion is just freak’n crazy!
The ability to plaster ads in front of millions of idiots is very valuable.
“The place is so busy nobody goes there any more.”
Indeed, I dropped Myspace long ago. $35 million seems like a paltry sum compared to what it was worth. I can’t see why it’s worth anything.
Yeah $35 million is likely to prove too much.
The same thing happened to bebo.com, it was bought by AOL for close to a billion dollars, sold for less than $10 million.
No doubt it is, but as other social networks have shown, those idiots can fade away like the morning dew if something they perceive as better/cooler/easier comes along. I think facebook is already too big for it to ever fail in the same way myspace/friendster/bebo etc. have but it might not appear quite as valuable in a few years as it has done. That goes without saying for any company though. 
Really? At one time, more than 25% of all the traffic on the Internet was to MySpace. Look at it now. Things change like lightning in “internet time.”
As long as Facebook stays simple and easy to use, it’ll be on top. The minute they turn it into a truly convoluted piece of shit (as opposed to a slightly convoluted piece of shit) it will go the way of Myspace and another more streamlined interface will dominate. Preferably one that allows you to post music files and view (not download but actually view in the viewer) high-resolution photos.
I think it’s too big to fail. Google is far to big to ever be replaced, though Yahoo and MSN have their own spiders. Google results pale to what they used to be, now that the scraper sights rank high and often.
Then there is eBay. It’s far too big to fail. Sure there are a lot of small niche competitors like Craigslist, but they were able to find the key.
MySpace took off but became bloated by letting people write code. Yahoo360 was a clone of MySpace and had a nice, turn off formatting. So you could easily breeze through it. But it didn’t last.
Facebook is different that MySpace. MySpace was to express yourself and others you didn’t know would come and talk to you. Facebook was cliquish and was designed to be for only people you already know in real life.
People don’t want to go on the Internet to meet people like they used to. They only want to use it for people they already know.
I am an oldie to the Internet, and I remember in the mid 90s you could go on IRC or an HTML chat and always, I mean ALWAYS find someone to talk to, to play games with. It was great.
Because bandwidth was small people couldn’t easily see what you looked like. So they would talk to you. Then as camera phones and bandwidth increased, people want to see you before they chat with you. And now you go on IRC and see if you can find someone to chat with. It’s doable but hard.
I remember theglobe.com which was a forerunner of MySpace and Facebook. But it was before it’s time.
People now have Facebook for friends, Google for search, eBay to auction.
Other niche sites will challenge but it’ll be a long time, if these big sites are knocked off their porch
I didn’t say it wouldn’t fail, I said it wouldn’t fail in the same way. I think though facebook has become an essential thing for many people in a way myspace only was for bands and teenagers. Facebook seems to have reached the part of the general public that have no other interest in going online. To them facebook is the internet for most intents and purposes.
BTW, Google already has a foray in social network, and it is called Orkut. As far as I can tell, mostly Brazilians and Indians use it.
Anecdotally, I think that Orkut is fading away. I was on it for a while since my cousins were but they’ve all shifted towards Facebook in the last two years.
Next someone will tell me Napster will go tits up.
I’m on it too, but yea, most of my contacts there have eventually transferred to Facebook.
But with lots of teenage Brazilian girls posting glittery things, it may take a while. 
Any predictions about Twitter’s fate over the next few years? Will it be replaced by something or someone else?