

It's too late for Myspace - fredoliveira
http://helloform.com/blog/2010/06/its-too-late-for-myspace/

======
dooshydoo
I disagree. It may be too late for Myspace to be Facebook, but any business
with an audience, no matter what size, has potential. Many struggling
businesses would kill to have a fraction of Myspace's brand awareness; to make
a left turn and have someone care.

Instead of losing hair wondering why people are leaving in droves, they should
reverse their attitude and kick people out.

They should go very narrow, maybe create a premium service priced to almost
insult people, and and play up the privacy angle.

Or, be what Facebook was and probably should have stayed; an easy to use
student-only network.

~~~
dasil003
Potential for what though? MySpace was purchased for $580mil, expectations
were high.

Who wants to turn MySpace into a little $10mil niche product? Certainly not
Murdoch. And anyone with that ambition probably would rather start from
scratch that associate themselves with a failed brand. It's all psychological.

~~~
dooshydoo
Well put. I wasn't taking the half billion in acquisition cost into
consideration. However, I think with their still-huge current audience, a
couple of cool-by-association acquisitions(pandora,indeed) and celebrity
spokespeople, it stands in a very good place.

As a competitor to Facebook, they're sinking. But if social networking in this
capacity turns, taking their medicine now for poor-sighted assumptions could
make a so-so company poised to look smart in hindsight, should they right the
ship.

I agree, there are major disadvantages to having this kind of link to old
industry money too(being slow, hackneyed CEO culture, etc.) But, Murdoch is
wily and buys talent.

I wouldn't bet against them; if for nothing else, their vehement protection of
pride.

~~~
whopa
> Murdoch is wily and buys talent.

Eh, Myspace was an eyeballs acquisition, not a talent acquisition. Myspace's
lack of a proper engineering culture contributed to its fall from grace;
Facebook's faster load times, quicker feature additions, and app platform play
all stem from a better engineering culture, and helped it overtake Myspace.

That's actually one of Myspace's biggest problems: they have a history of
shoddy engineering and architecture, so they can't attract top talent.

------
InfinityX0
It's not too late for Myspace - it's just too late for Myspace to be Facebook
or Google.

They still have strong brand equity that they can use to generate an extremely
profitable website, but what they require is a fortitude and humility to make
a hard pivot, fire tons of people, and shrink dramatically.

They can't operate at scale any longer, but they do have the opportunity to
leverage what still amounts to one of the top 10 brand names on the internet
and use it to create something that makes a select few rich - and more
importantly, actually creates value for others.

------
coderdude
It didn't help that most customized profiles ate more CPU than running Quake.
MySpace users discovered the worst CSS practices, or was it the "get MySpace
codes" sites?

~~~
code_duck
MySpace's own layout is heinous. Tables in tables in tables in useless
tables.... the site is completely insane.

------
yobb
I think myspace is still a viable place for a musician to set up an online
presence.

~~~
fredoliveira
Unfortunately, I have to disagree (and time and numbers are proving me right).
Once I had the idea of scraping visitor numbers for major musicians every day
in order to trace how their profile views were affected by the rise of Twitter
and Facebook, but never did. It is, however, quite visible.

If you're a musician, Myspace simply doesn't give you the tools to provide
your audience updates the way they want to consume them. Their twitter-like
stream is limited to the internal homepage that you can see while logged in,
which doesn't make sense. People want real-time and Myspace doesn't give them
that.

------
kristiandupont
My tattoo artist told me that MySpace was the place to be for that industry.
This was kind of interesting as I could see the appeal, but I wonder if that
will fade as well as it seems to be for musicians..

~~~
fredoliveira
I would say it'll fade too. The audience for tattoo artists overlaps with the
audience for musicians (or anything else, really) which is quickly fading.
Once a few tattoo artists start moving over to other forms of personal/brand
promotion, your tattoo artist friend will probably move too.

------
theprodigy
It is too late for Myspace to be the epicenter of the social networking
movement, but Myspace can make a lot of money if it becomes a dating site.

------
paul9290
I think recent prior executives feel the same way. They seem to be leaving in
droves.

