What happened to Myspace?

[msmith537]

@Ruminator

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.)

I have to think to kill Facebook at this point, it can’t be just some incremental change. It would have to be some ubiquitous new thing that people would use constantly.

[ZipperJJ]

@Cisco

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.

No way. Facebook isn’t a Website, it’s a database. Its most popular mode of access is via the Web. But you can already access Facebook without the Web via a mobile app (NOT via a mobile browser, such as Safari on the iPhone). IIRC you can also access it via some televisions and maybe some game consoles.

Facebook has done all the work of figuring out the best way to relate people to each other, doing live data pushes and having the infrastructure to back an enormous amount of traffic. Unless your company is devoted to all of those actions, your company is going to fail to provide what users are willing to use.

Google tried to incorporate mail, chat and some sort of “wall” into their Buzz and nobody. gave. a. shit. Except for the people that freaked out and sued Google for being way too intrusive.

SmackFu and Justin_Bailey bring up a very important thing that differentiates FB from MySpace - the wall. Facebook is all about conversations. MySpace, no matter how hard people tried, could not be used for “public” conversation (ie anyone on your friend list is invited to join in).

Interaction has ALWAYS been an exciting feature on the Web. Newsgroups, then chat rooms, then message boards, then the more personal journal-blogs. With all of those things, even though a person would be drawn to the community based on common interests, eventually spam took over each medium. With Facebook, you’re part of a community of your choosing…in fact, with different “hubs” of friends, many communities of your choosing…and the noise is minimal.

For me, Facebook is like an Internet utopia. MySpace had the right idea, sort of - “Let’s all get together!” but Facebook went one step further with “Let’s get together, and interact together!”

[Bootis]

@Justin_Bailey

Yes. Except it was made up solely of messages other users send to you.

It was more or less the only social interaction between users that was allowable on MySpace.

Don’t forget the blogs though, you could post blog entries, that appeared at top of your page, and friends could comment on it just like facebook. The only difference being that the blog entries appeared as a title that you’d click to read it in its own window, which made it a little more cumbersome for something more short and mundane.

[Cisco]

Myspace also had “bulletins”, which were pretty much exactly like wall posts, but hidden off in a small corner and you had to click on them.