Lost in MySpace
B, The Baltimore Sun’s lame attempt at a weekly, occasionally hits the mark, like with their recent article on the fall of Myspace. They discuss how MySpace, owned by good ol’ Murdoch, has recently laid off about 700 employees, claiming that they need to reduce bloat and increase flexibility for faster innovation.
Talk about an understatement. Aside from adding gigantic ads to every page, MySpace’s only recent changes were creating a hacked-together personal update function. And even this was just playing catch-up with Facebook and Twitter – the bad sign for any company.
MySpace needs to quell some of the wildly dysfunctional profiles, allow opt-in with annoying profile songs, and get rid of the obnoxious ads if it wants to bring users back. And even those aren’t guaranteed to work; once popular perceptions change, users start jumping ship quickly. Take for example Kuro5hin.org or 4Chan, once large, successful member-run communities, now wastelands mostly abandoned or filled with losers. A meteoric rise can turn into a parabolic trajectory which ends up hitting the ground with terrific force.
And as if it could sense I was writing this post, MySpace just sent me a pleading e-mail to “check out what my friends are doing.” No, thanks. I don’t hang out with fat websites.
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Tags: facebook, myspace, social critique