Obviously, the short-short answer is “Facebook”, but that doesn’t tell us much.
Myspace is a site that absolutely exploded in popularity during the mid-to-late part of last decade, and has just as quickly become a joke. A book was written calling it “the most popular website in America”, and by the time it got to press this wasn’t even close to being true. (I just checked and it’s 37th overall).
So what happened?
I originally got on Myspace to keep in touch with family who lived in different parts of the country and the world. A couple years ago, several of my cousins started migrating to Facebook, and when I asked them why, they said it had better privacy controls (which seems funny looking back, considering all the privacy issues Facebook has had in the last year). But I don’t think that’s why most people switched. There was a mass exodus from Myspace to Facebook in 2008-09, and I followed the herd, but I’m still really not sure why.
The trouncing has been so complete that a business student friend of mine recently told me that he learned in class that Myspace doesn’t even consider itself a social networking site anymore. They’re a music site or something.
And the obvious final question is: Is Facebook destined for the same crash?
You can probably find it by searching, but I read an interesting piece a while back about how racial segregation had played a role in social networking sites, and MySpace had become seen as the African American social networking site. It talked about “white flight” from MySpace.
I have no idea how accurate it is, as I have never had a MySpace account. But it’s out there somewhere.
While it is true that a lot of the remaining MySpace users are black, calling it white flight is a bit of an overstatement. I think it’s similar to the coolness wave that radiates out from the coasts into the center of the US. In the computer world, for better or worse, white folks find the cool stuff first. Then it filters down to black computer users, many of whom use public PCs to get on the Internet. But among the black patrons at the library I work at, MySpace has finally given way to Facebook, so even the racial divide is over with now.
As for the question of why MySpace is so over in the computer world, just look at the trajectory of personal websites. Back in the late 90s/early 2000s, people used Geocities and the sites they made looked really shitty. Then everyone started migrating to blogs that offered fewer design options but a better user experience.
MySpace offered many of the same design options as Geocities and people’s pages were loud, took forever to load and were generally shitty. This gave users the impression that MySpace was a shitty site. Facebook offered fewer options, but had a better user experience overall. And it launched its Games service well before MySpace did and hooked a lot of new users that had yet to even consider MySpace. Just like that, Farmville/Scrabulous/Mafia Wars made them Facebook users for life.
I think you’re on to something there. I assume they’ve fixed it, but for awhile there, some Myspace pages got out-of-control ugly. Big, flashy, image-heavy backgrounds, small, unreadable text, a song AND a video that loaded when you viewed the page . . . there were lots of people whose pages I just knew not to visit.
And Farmville/Mafia Wars definitely attracted a lot of Facebook users who otherwise don’t give a shit about social networking. I blocked them a long time ago, but I assume they’re still popular. Some bitch just killed her baby because it was crying while she was trying to play Farmville.
I believe the real problem was the out of control use of HTML and designs. People just didn’t have a clue, what looks good in one browser looks horrible in another. What is good if you have a 6.0 DSL download connection is unviewable in dial up or slower DSL.
Even with 6.0 DSL so many profiles take forever to download. At least with Yahoo’s 360 you had the option of turning off the page styling of others.
MySpace became a victim of its own success. It tried to be everything to everyone and wound up annoying everyone in the process
Facebook is starting to go this way too but it’ll take awhile, 'cause there’s nothing really to jump to. People annoyed with MySpace went to Facebook but there isn’t a big thing for people annoyed with Facebook to go to, well not yet. But there will be.
I think Facebook will stick around until there is a paradigm shift away from the concept of dedicated social networking. The thing about seeing all your old friends again is that it’s really cool . . . for about 2 seconds. I can’t count how many people I’ve been really excited to get back in touch with, or who’ve been excited to get back in touch with me, and we haven’t spoken since that initial contact.
I could see a new concept that, believe it or not, is more like AOL was in the mid-90s. I think within a couple more generations of OSes, we’ll be running our computers and storing information almost exclusively online, and there will be (probably built into the operating system), unified software that does instant messaging, email, peer-to-peer, [the equivalent of] “wall posts”, etc. When this comes along, Facebook, as a website, will be obsolete.
Microsoft, Google, and Apple could all potentially be the one to do this (I’m thinking one of the first two), and it’s interesting to note that they’re all in the mobile phone market. I expect this to be highly integrated with cell phones and other mobile devices.
I’ve said it before: it got to the point where I hesitated to go to someone’s MySpace page because I would be overwhelmed with huge load times, unwanted music, and sucky-ass layouts. Facebook was much more rigid and I don’t hesitate to click people’s pages there.
Plus there are other things to do on Facebook. The status page makes me want to explore other people. MySpace you had to go and find things and that meant huge load times, unwanted music…
On the web, there is no such thing as too big to fail. The interesting thing about the web, there’s very little brand loyalty among the majority of users. Seems like every 4 to 5 years or so a new trend comes along and sweeps what was before it away. I believe by 2012 or so FB will be as much yesterdays thing as MySpace is now.
Think about it, Yahoo was once king. These days, I honestly don’t if it still exists. Livejournal was the hot trend, now it’s even deader than MySpace. Of course, myspace was king once. And Geocities. Netscape ruled for years. Then IE ruled for years. These days IE is fading to Firefox. Those are just the offhand examples I can think of, I’m sure there’s many other once hot sites that are now pale reflections of their glory days. Sites which focus on only one thing eventually die, it’s just how the web works.
Now sites like Google, which do a very wide variety of things, might be too big to fail, but facebook isn’t anywhere near that diverse.
Except for Geocities (which Yahoo shut down), all of those sites are still thriving. Yahoo is still huge and still hugely popular. LiveJournal may not have the community it once did, but people still use it for blogging. Netscape became Firefox. But IE still command the majority of market share in the browser wars.
When you control 95% of the market, the only way to go is down. But that doesn’t mean these “lost” technologies disappeared.
With all of its Applications, Facebook does more things than Google. It’ll stick around even if something better comes along because it’s so entrenched.
Everything goes in cycles. I can see FB falling into a similar pit as MySpace at some point. People will return to LJ. There will be something better than Firefox or Chrome. It’s the way life goes.
I still don’t understand why MySpace didn’t put a simple toggle switch allowing users to browse others profiles without seeing that users HTMLmarkup.
Yahoo360 which was a MySpace clone did this and it worked great.
I never saw the appeal of Facebook as I want to meet new people. It’s not designed for that, so it doesn’t appeal to me. I only opened an account as people said, it might help in a job search but so far nothing and I have a very unique last name.
Google has been around too long to be displaced, at least rapidly. Like Apple and Linux, Yahoo and Firefox have settle comfortably into niche markets with users they like.
I tried MySpace for a bit but never really got into it. First of all, I found it difficut to locate very many of my friends since everyone seems to use weird user names and the search functionality sucked.
Also, the whole site seemed, for lack of a better term, ghetto. You have the constant bombardment of friend requests from prostitutes or whatever the heck that spam is. People either have the crappy default layout or garish web sites they created themselves.
Facebook seemed a lot more upscale. Originally you needed an email address from a participating college or company or other organization. That just made it a lot easier to find and connect with old friends.
As for Facebook going away, I don’t see it happening anytime soon. Facebook is becoming more and more integrated with other networks like Google, Twitter and Yahoo. The events calendar is frequently becomming a tool my friends use to organize activities. Even large corporations are looking to recongnize Facebook as a tool of communication. As this trend continues, NOT having some sort of Facebook account will be an inconvienience. Sort of like not having a phone or email address.
The common reasons given such as Myspace having uglier web pages isn’t the real reason. That’s just the cosmetic aspects of what people see at the surface level. Cosmetics can be changed. If you look underneath the cosmetics, you’d see that Myspace and Facebook are very different companies.
Myspace was started by a small group of business entrepreneurs (Chris DeWolf & Tom Anderson). The technical staff (the programmers, the geeks) were not the core founders. Myspace thought of themselves as an elaborate media “portal”. The early days of the company didn’t have programmers with mathematics & statistics PhDs in graphing the nodes of social relationships. Why would they need such specialists?! They’re a “portal” … a souped up Yahoo pages gateway. This early mindset contributes to the users frustrations at not easily “connecting” with friends.
Facebook was started by hardcore computer programming geeks (Mark Zuckererberg and his Harvard roomates.) Their technical underpinnings from the very beginning was algorithms to compute “social interactions.” They didn’t see themselves as a portal. Because of their early focus on extracting value from the relationships of people (the nodes of a graph) they were able to introduce new features that Myspace didn’t have. It also turns out that this type of analysis is very compelling and they were able to recruit the best technical talent available. (Many Facebook employees are ex-Google.) Myspace couldn’t match the IQ of Facebook. If you’re a 22-year old computer whiz kid, why would you go work for a Rupert Murdoch electronic newspaper portal instead of inventing new analysis techniques for connecting friends & family?
A lot of journalists made comparisons between Myspace and Facebook because they both had a millions of users but their analysis was superficial. It’s like comparing the subscribers of a Golf Magazine to the members of a Golf Country Club. Yes, both the magazine and the club has “users” but the dynamics of each group are different. How you make money from them is different. Myspace saw their users as an “audience” – the endpoints of media dissemination. Facebook saw their users as a “source” of rich statistical data. Completely different mindsets which leads to radically different ways of making money and attracting certain types of talented employees.
Yes, it’s possible because “social networking” isn’t the be all end all of web. There may be a group of college computer geeks working on the Facebook killer. Facebook has many gaps to yet to be exploited. They don’t handle financial transactions (trade, barter, money) between people. (Paypal isn’t the final word on this.) Facebook also doesn’t handle scheduling. (Google calendars doesn’t fully solve this issue either.)