Myspace Calls It Quits

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It is pretty telling when the CEO of MySpace, Mike Jones, refers to his company, not as a social networking site, which most of us thought it is, but as, “one of the largest entertainment experiences on the Web.”

That’s a far distance from where the internet pioneer began. Now MySpace is conceding to Facebook, a move most users know has been long overdue. The site has fallen so far out of the rankings that it is having to agree to what’s being called a “mash up” with competitor Facebook in a last ditch effort to help them stay in business by holding on to what members they have left.

MySpace will now allow a connection across Facebook and its own site. This will mean that Facebook users will be able to log into MySpace using their Facebook account information from now on, and they’ll even be able have their likes and interest from their Facebook profile pages populate their MySpace pages. That’s a pretty hard beating to take, ahem, excuse me, concession to make.

Back in 2005, MySpace ...
... was worth $580 million dollars; well, that’s what Rupert Murdoch paid for it at the height of its popularity. Now, the giant global social networking site Facebook has taken over the lion’s share of the market, with 500 million users. Bear in mind the population of the USA alone is only around 280 million peopleâ€and strange individuals who haven’t signed up for Facebook yet do still exist in the country. What the high level of members Facebook enjoys tells us, it that it has a global appeal that MySpace never had. This was emphatically demonstrated during the 2009 Iranian elections, the outcome of which sparked a movement of protests now being referred to as the Green Revolution, which resulted in a harsh government crackdown. It was Facebook that the average Iranian turned to, to let the world know what was going on when their own state run media failed them. It was a moment in time when citizen journalism once again became a force in the world, and people started to see the potential of Facebook beyond status updates about what their pets were doing.

MySpace has never attracted that kind of use, or even much use outside of the United States. Perhaps it was due to the busy, almost adolescent quality it always possessed. To be fair, it was the first social networking site to come on the scene with mass appeal, and that appeal ending up taking off like wildfire among adolescent users (whether they were actual teenagers or not). But it was more than that. In contrast, since Mark Zuckerburg originally designed Facebook for the college environment, it would naturally have had an outlet to spread internationally, as well as possess a very different character. Now everyone from the President to your local bank feels that a Facebook presence is a legitimate, official medium to connect with interested users. It has blossomed into a force and a potent marketing tool along with its success, despite privacy concerns year after year.

MySpace lost the social network battle a long time ago; it’s just finally acknowledging their own irrelevance by officially throwing in the towel.