

Myspace to “lay off 550 to 600 employees tomorrow” - skbohra123
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/01/10/myspace-to-lay-off-550-to-600-employees-tomorrow/

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angdis
I like to compare facebook with myspace:

MySpace: Like your parents basement. Bad behavior, language and lack of
decorum-- no problem. This is where the "fun" parties were.

Facebook: Like your parents living room. Don't spill anything on the carpet
because it will stain and be there forever. Only "nice" friends are allowed.
The parents are monitoring everything.

RIP MySpace!

~~~
pavel_lishin
And much like the basement, seemingly built and furnished by a drunken
contractor who would be leaving the country in two weeks.

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cmaggard
To be honest I'm astounded that they still had that many to lay off.

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ben1040
Amazing how Myspace has about fallen off the face of the earth. I remember 5
or 6 years ago at the height of Myspace, it was getting harder for me to stay
on top of the local music scene, because bands began to give up on posting
flyers in bars. Posting flyers took time and money, while Myspace was free and
99% of their fans were on it anyway.

~~~
bmj
Has this changed? Are bands moving to Facebook? I ask because I'm not on
Facebook, but I do find lots of info on Myspace.

~~~
ubercore
My band is on facebook primarily for event invitations. We use bandcamp for
posting songs, and our own .com that basically serves as links to facebook and
bandcamp. We also use reverbnation on our facebook site.

We _also_ commission physical flyers from local artists.

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tallanvor
This isn't too surprising. The early versions of social networking (MySpace,
Friendster, Hi5, etc.) didn't manage to adapt quickly enough to maintain
relevance.

Facebook faces the same risk down the line. Sure, they've done much better at
adapting and finding ways to hold the interest of users, but there's no
guarantee that they will continue to do so.

~~~
Kadin
I'm not entirely sure it was 'adaptation' that was the issue.

It wasn't that Facebook adapted and MySpace didn't; it was more that Facebook
_started off_ in a totally different direction from MySpace, and it turned out
that the market preferred Facebook's way. To focus on just a single difference
that's probably the most obvious to casual users, Myspace allowed users a
great deal of flexibility in designing their own pages (poorly), Facebook
didn't and still doesn't, and basically presents a standardized page for each
user with their information on it. There's a significant 'philosophical
difference' there. Those differences extended beyond design to their user-
acquisition strategy, which created the network effects that allowed Facebook
to crush Myspace among college users.

Bluntly, the market decided it preferred a nicely manicured, access-controlled
walled garden to the free-for-all of Myspace.

Interestingly, though, I think Facebook has now opened itself up to everyone
to the point where it risks getting "Myspaced" itself; if influential users
were to suddenly jump ship to something else, Facebook could become about as
cool as having a Myspace page or Hotmail email address, and an exodus could
follow.

Facebook built itself in large part on exclusivity but has attempted to move
away from it in order to grow. They're trying to walk a very delicate edge and
I suspect that they'll fall off eventually.

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citricsquid
I wonder, does anyone believe that Myspace can recover with the right
decisions, or are they destined for a slow death whatever they do?

~~~
thewordpainter
MySpace is done. They've been done.

They tried to reestablish the brand with a general focus on entertainment, but
nobody was buying it.

I'd say up until the last six months, they still had 80%+ of the artist market
using their service. You can't give that up...but they did. Now every artist
is spreading out to sites like Bandcamp.

without the artists, what do they have? a social network? ha!

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Spoutingshite
Myspace has been confined to the "special needs" area of the interned for
quite a while, however it's a shame that this news article has come out as
it's aparently in advance of an official notice that effects the lives of 600
people.

I don't see how the public interest in this trumps the lack of respect to the
employees. Shame.

~~~
beoba
Seriously wondering here: What's disrespectful about this announcement?

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JacobAldridge
Not my usual HN style to link to an old gag-of-sorts, but this is kinda
relevant and somewhat smart funny: Tom joins Facebook

[http://failbook.failblog.org/2010/12/17/funny-facebook-
fails...](http://failbook.failblog.org/2010/12/17/funny-facebook-fails-
classic-tom-joins-facebook/)

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fwdbureau
Maybe this is too small scale to be relevant, but i recently designed a site
for a rockabilly clothes webstore, with a complete panel of tools: myspace
(traditional friending, exchanging thankyous), facebook (fanpage & paying
ads), google ads and twitter... And since day 1, myspace has been the nr. 1
referrer (to such an extent that bandwidth quotas exploded, and my customer
had to upgrade their hosting plan). So I would say that for some niches,
myspace is still nr. 1. Also, coding css for myspace is really fun, if you
like a good challenge

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dangrover
I remember people marveling at Digg's 60 employees when they started to lay
some off. Oy.

