
Will MySpace ever lose its monopoly? (2007) - Jarred
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business.comment
======
dvt
Back in 2003, I would've found it absolutely _inconceivable_ to not chat with
my HS classmates on AIM. For me, even bigger than MySpace dying was AIM dying.
It still kind of blows my mind. AIM was _the_ way you got social cachet back
then. Everyone was on AIM. _Young people_ were on AIM.

I am completely convinced that FB will go the way of the dodo in the next
decade, and it will take Snapchat and Instagram with it.

~~~
losteric
I remember moving to FB when my mom joined MySpace... I've since straight up
quit social media, but I know folks that moved on to IG/Snap so they could
broadcast content they didn't want certain social groups to see via FB. Of
course now those social groups are joining the newer mediums.

Maybe social media platforms are inherently cyclical? At least under the
"maximum growth" mindset:

* Innovators develop new platforms because they're unhappy with the old

* Early adopters like the new platform's features or community

* If it's good enough, the early majority slowly follows as knowledge disseminates

* New features and narratives are developed to attract the late majority and laggards

* The presence of those people, and tactics used to attract them, disenfranchise the early adopters

* Unhappiness rises until a new digital eden is discovered. Then the cycle repeats

~~~
deathhand
My personal journey: Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, HN

~~~
DrScump
Based on other responses here, I guess I'd be dating myself to say mine
started with Usenet.

~~~
tyingq
BBS, Fidonet, Usenet, ...

Someone will oneup this too with Arpanet or similar :)

~~~
dbcurtis
I talked to the other hams in high school using Morse code and a vacuum tube
transmitter.

And get off my lawn. :)

I've actually joked about building a Bluetooth telegraph key to make texting
more concenient.

~~~
Someone
I assume you already have the Morse key USB keyboard?
([https://mitxela.com/projects/morse_code_usb_keyboard_mk_ii](https://mitxela.com/projects/morse_code_usb_keyboard_mk_ii))

------
philwelch
If Facebook goes away, MySpace is nowhere near an adequate analogy. Facebook
has 2.2 billion monthly active users. In other words, there are more active
monthly Facebook users in the world than:

* Roman Catholics (1.2 billion)

* People living in China (1.4 billion)

* Total speakers of English, the most widely-spoken language in the world (1.4 billion)

* Muslims (1.8 billion)

* Viewers of the 2014 FIFA World Cup final (1 billion)

* iPhones ever manufactured (1.2 billion; also, the top two most-used apps are Facebook and Facebook Messenger)

* Windows users (1.4 billion)

* Inhabitants of the European Union (508 million)

* Cats (600 million)

* Firearms (875 million)

* Africans (1 billion)

Now, obviously whether or not you use Facebook isn't as important to your
identity or as hard to change as your religion or where you live, but it's
also not something that's just going to suddenly disappear without some sort
of replacement, or else if it does, it will be the first time in human history
that _two billion people_ all decided at once to give up on something.

~~~
dotsh
Probably half of that are fake profiles, profiles made by people for
commercial purposes or bots. If you make fake account and you will start
wandering in the endless facebook steppes, you will notice that many of them
are one post account that advertise or play games. The best ones are those
with pictures of known or lesser known models to collect friends and sell such
an account for dollars later. I have reported several hundred of such
profiles, of which maybe 1/20 have been blocked rest is fine because
moderators can't see difference between real life person and photo from google
images in 20 accounts in a row...

~~~
philwelch
2.2 billion isn't the total number of accounts, it's the number of "monthly
active users"\--and Facebook would probably be in much hotter water than they
are now if they cooked the books on that number.

~~~
dotsh
This don't change my comment still many of them are fakes. I know people who
have 5-6 accounts active at one time playing different games with 500+ friends
on it. Many of those "friends" also are fakes, some even with the same profile
picture of "real person" with fake data but I have nothing against FB, every
medium is abused.

It's just interesting that not a single research was done on this topic that I
know about. :)

~~~
da02
Why do your friends have 5+ accounts opened? To get around limits on games?

~~~
dotsh
Game limits, not wanting to share private account with some random folks used
in games or for commercial purposes aka selling account later on and I can
tell that this business is booming! :)

------
legitster
This is a perfect summation of how people feel about Google and Amazon, or
Sears in the 1920s and Kodak in the 1960s. And it's a perfect reminder that
monopolies are much more fleeting than people realize.

~~~
brianpan
I'm not so sure that FB's place will be so fleeting. I think they will lose
their place at the same rate that Microsoft lost theirs. They will still be
around in 15 years later, just not quite as relevant.

~~~
gfo
Microsoft is coming back in a big way though. Sure, it may not have the
dominance it used to have but they've learned from the problems of the Ballmer
era. Satya Nadella seems to be a huge proponent of meeting customers where
they are and it's paying off in a huge way.

If Facebook learns to listen to their customers the way Microsoft has (as
opposed to trying to tell them what they want) then they could recover. But
with Facebook, users are starting to have large issues with its core business
model, and to listen to customers and adopt the changes they want, it would
cost them too much and would eventually disappear as so many others have
before them.

~~~
isostatic
> Microsoft is coming back in a big way though.

Really? They still have corporate desktops and cheap skanky laptops (for some
reason), but azure is not a challange to AWS, they aren't in the media
business, the home market is being chipped away, where are they doing better
now then they were 12 months ago?

~~~
spiralx
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurengensler/2017/07/20/micros...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurengensler/2017/07/20/microsoft-
fourth-quarter-earnings-cloud-azure/)

Since 12 months ago profits have doubled, shares are up 19%, revenue is up
13%, cloud revenue is up 11%, cash reserves are up, oh, and PC-related revenue
is down a whopping 2%.

Actually the latest quarter shows cloud revenue up 98% (I assume year-on-
year), so Azure is doing pretty well.

[https://www.computerworlduk.com/it-vendors/is-microsoft-
azur...](https://www.computerworlduk.com/it-vendors/is-microsoft-azure-really-
making-up-ground-on-aws-3671566/)

------
pdkl95
Dan Rather, after offering sage advice[1] to Mark Zuckerberg regarding the
recent FB/CA drama, concluded with:

> This is about Facebook's survival, pure and simple. If you don't change
> things, people will leave faster than you can say "MySpace".

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kObNf_gUXxE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kObNf_gUXxE)

------
rconti
Facebook was started in, what, 2004? It went mainstream on most college
campuses in 2005. By 2006, MySpace was a place for the non-college educated;
the older generation never used it, the college-aged users had switched (if
they ever used it at all), and the younger generation either weren't on
either, or were on MySpace but aspired to be on Facebook by the time they got
to college.

There were legions of people who couldn't handle how downright ugly and
terrible MySpace pages were, and simply never used it, even when it was the
only option.

The idea that MySpace had a "monopoly" on anything, 2 years after Facebook
went mainstream, is absurd. It never had anything like the market penetration
FB has, even among those online and interested in social media, let alone the
overall user numbers that FB has.

~~~
slavik81
I was slow to join Facebook and I signed up in late 2006, several months
before this article was written. The author here was just out of touch.

In September 2006 Facebook opened to everybody. At the end of the year,
Facebook had 12 million active users, roughly doubling their number from 2005.
By April 2007 they had 20 million users. By the end of the year they had 50
million. The author wrote this piece right in the middle of Facebook's
meteoric growth and they didn't even notice.

The press had the same blindness over AOL Time Warner. To 13-year-old me, that
merger sounded like a dinosaur from the Cretaceous combining with a dinosaur
from the Jurassic, but for some reason all the papers thought AOL was the
business of the future. They had no sense for what was cool.

------
acheron
I love this article. I think I submitted it to HN myself a couple years ago
during some other Facebook news cycle.

I'd call it "Peak Guardian", but they keep outdoing themselves, so there may
never be a Peak Guardian.

~~~
JBReefer
Can you explain stereotypes of the Guardian? The article is pretty over the
top, but as an American I am not intimately familiar with them like, say, the
Journal.

~~~
matthewmacleod
The Guardian is generally a mildly left-ish, middle-class-ish kind of paper. I
would say in the UK it tends to conjure up an image of a well-meaning,
slightly naïve, hand-wringing sort of readership, though of course it’s base
is likely wider than that.

What particularly makes it stand out is it has quite an open comments policy;
it quite often publishes fairly ludicrous points of view from a variety of
commentators. I’d say on the whole that’s quite a good thing, though it does
tend to result in some absolutely preposterous headlines from time to time.

~~~
MarkMc
Although usually mild-left, they sometimes publish articles which are pretty
crazy-left.

Here's an example[1]: You have a university professor citing research saying
that the 'acting white' phenomenon exists in integrated schools, plus _her own
black students tell her they suffered from the 'acting white' stigma_. Yet she
somehow concludes that belief in the phenomenon is not just wrong but
'intellectually dishonest'.

[1]
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/22/acting...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/22/acting-
white-theory-dear-white-people-college)

~~~
dragonwriter
> You have a university professor citing research saying that the 'acting
> white' phenomenon exists in integrated schools

...in the course of arguing that it's image as a feature of all-black
communities is false. ( _Integrated_ is very different from _all-black_.)

> plus her own black students tell her they suffered from the 'acting white'
> stigma.

What sdoes is relate that the “bullying essay” is a well-known archetype of
freshman comp essay, and the common subtype of that type of essay she sees is
one conforming to a particular form of the “acting white” narrative.

Freshman comp essays from people who don't have stories they want to share
reflecting the author inserting themselves into narratives from the common
folklore of their community instead of actual personal experience is a rather
well-known phenomenon.

------
JohnJamesRambo
"It did." -Ron Howard narration

~~~
phil248
Comedy doesn't seem to fair well on HN, but at least Arrested Development is
still sacrosanct.

~~~
phil248
Ahem, _fare_ well.

------
pascalxus
If FB declines completely and goes the way of my space, what will happen to
all those 3 million dollar 100 years old, 1200 sq ft houses in palo alto?

~~~
IAmGraydon
Facebook != Palo Alto. The real estate in Palo Alto is propped up by far more
than just Facebook. Mainly by massive amounts of venture capital flowing into
startups.

------
alangibson
At 2B users, it's hard to imagine doing a faceplant as fast as MySpace did.
But I can definitely see a situation where it is hollowed out in the short
term, meaning that 'high value' demographics flee to some other service. If
it's bad enough, it could drop their advertising revenue enough to hobble them
and precipitate a slow decline.

~~~
teleclimber
The "face-planting" could be regional. It's possible North American and
European users might drop off swiftly while FB continues to grow in other
parts of the world.

------
gtycomb
This reads like a comedy now, the flow of logic faultless, reminding us how
fleeting these technologies are along with the anxieties we have about them
taking over the world.

~~~
Nomentatus
Right, a social network gaining market power and maybe abusing that? Ha, those
days are long gone, kappa.

------
submeta
I wonder if an open source platform and protocol for messaging and contacts
would have the potential to confront all the Facebooks, Whatsapps, etc

I am not talking about broadcasting / sharing. Just messaging and contacts (a
listing where you can publish your latest contact data).

So many people say that they would leave FB but they have no other means to
contact many of their friends on their list. So is there anyone who can offer
a solution for just this?

Email is a protocol that works very good. So is sms. Platform and provider
independend. - Something as successful as email with a listing of people and
auto-updating contacts list (details only shown to someone that I allow).

~~~
deadbunny
There are a few projects that try and address this. The issue for 99% of the
population is that you need to run it yourself (read run a server) or know
someone who does.

You could go the p2p route (I'm thinking Torrents + magnet links kind of
decentralised) so you just run a client and connect to the network.

Of course this then leads to the problem that users would have to backup their
data (which they don't) and be online to participate with no real capacity for
offline comms. Which leads back to needing to running a server of some kind.

------
blackoil
Do monopolies of this scale are ever overthrown? MS in desktop OS, Intel in
desktop and server chips. IBM is still a monopoly in mainframe market(not
sure). It's just that new powerful industry in terms of mobile, internet
services, social media have come up.

American Tobacco, Bell, Standard Oil and too some extent MSFT are all gone
because of govt. actions.

FB has already successfully maneuvered industry change to mobile. It bought in
its way into mobile apps and communication platforms. So FB won't be replaced
by mastodon or Signal, but by an industry level shift which FB misses and
can't buy in.

~~~
wilsonnb
You're correct, IBM is more of a monopoly in the mainframe market now than
ever before.

As far as I know, no one else makes mainframe hardware anymore aside from
storage racks you can use with an IBM mainframe.

------
afsina
My take is, The Guardian does not understand the concept of monopolies well.

------
ggg9990
Facebook has long been losing its monopoly... to Instagram. They have enough
money to keep buying the Next Big Thing.

~~~
Double_a_92
But isn't instagram (and also Snapchat) mostly photo sharing? How can that
replace a communication tool?

Do young people really like chatting in public comments and in that cumbersome
Snapchat chat?

Mostly I've seen teen girls just writing and "luv ya bb" under each others
photos...

------
LMMojo
Does Diaspora still exist? (Answer is "yes") Does anyone use it? Asking
because I have no idea, but the idea looks cool.
[[http://DiasporaFoundation.org](http://DiasporaFoundation.org)]

------
fourmii
It's funny, I used to use MySpace to bookmark bands I liked or may like. Now I
use FB for the mainly same thing, as well as keeping up on other interests
like skating and surfing. Oh, how cyclical the world is...

------
psychometry
Was this article supposed to be a joke at the time it was written? Facebook
had been open to the public for a year at that point and it was clear that
Myspace didn't even have a monopoly left to lose.

~~~
incompatible
There's another article from a few months later about Facebook "opening up"
their platform with apps. They were taking over fast at that point.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/may/31/newmedia....](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/may/31/newmedia.media2)

------
arnaudsm
Breaking monopolies is always a good thing for consumers.

Anyone knows a Social network with solid features, perfect UI and good privacy
?

~~~
M4v3R
I hear Mastodon [1] is getting traction, though for me the UI is a bit
unintuitive.

[1] [http://joinmastodon.org](http://joinmastodon.org)

~~~
theptip
IIUC Mastodon is a twitter alternative;
[https://diasporafoundation.org/](https://diasporafoundation.org/) is more
targeted at replacing FB.

~~~
taborj
Diaspora has been around for a while; I remember joining about 6-7 years ago,
but it suffered from the problem all new social networking sites suffer from
-- nobody I knew or wanted to follow was there, so I abandoned it.

I've since come to the conclusion that I'm not really a social networking type
of person.

~~~
ams6110
Both Mastodon and Diaspora suffer from absolutely horrible names.

------
mkadlec
Wait, MySpace is dead?!?

------
IronWolve
And to think Fubar.com outlived them all.

------
m3kw9
They lost it when they couldn’t scale

------
jpm_sd
Google+ is going to take over the world any day now!

~~~
johnhenry
I'm sticking with Facebook. They're the only social network with whom I can
trust my private data.

~~~
klez
Said no-one ever.

Seriously, I'm too biased now to remember, but was there ever a time this was
the feeling about FB?

~~~
johnhenry
It was never even a consideration. Social network are still a relatively new
phenomenon for the world and few people thought seriously about their
implications. In retrospect, more of use should have thought about how our
data is bing used. Hopefully we can learn from our mistakes.

------
feelin_googley

       facebook.com (1998)
    

"With aboutface.com you can easily set up a directory for your organization in
your own private location right on this Web site. If you prefer, we also offer
a traditional, Windows-based product, AboutFace/Windows version 3.9, which you
can use on your LAN.

aboutface.com is a Web-based service that functions as a directory for your
organization. aboutface.com maintains photographs and biographies of your
employees and takes the place of your old-fashioned printed phone lists,
address lists, facebooks, etc. aboutface.com is available for low monthly
rates and resides in a secure, private location on our servers.

We are the premier producer of electronic facebooks (online "names and faces"
directories) for the business and academic communities."

Source:

[http://web.archive.org/web/19981212013921/http://facebook.co...](http://web.archive.org/web/19981212013921/http://facebook.com:80/)

------
heckless
Pedant alert: "it's" -> "its" :)

~~~
dmerfield
They don't call it the Grauniad for nothing!

See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Eye#In-
jokes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Eye#In-jokes)

------
justherefortart
All the cool kids were on facebook.

I remember signing up in 2005 because I was taking German for my future trip
to the World Cup (pointless as 95%+ will reply in __English __(edit), unlike
those darn French!).

As it grew in size and popularity, the limited nature of it really made those
that couldn't get in jealous. I remember all the kids screaming about the feed
when it went live, how they'd leave. Then once it opened to everyone, they'd
leave then.

WhatsApp seems to be the new kid's playground, so facebook buying it was a
smart move.

There will be another. Hell, maybe I'll make it :-)

Dropped out of my (still better IMO) Telegram style program after worrying
about N$A fallout.

~~~
ryandvm
The per university rollout of Facebook was genius. Actually keeping people
from signing up until there is critical mass is, I suspect, crucial for
building a social network.

There's nothing to discourage me from coming back quite like the feeling of
signing up and finding out I'm the only one I know.

~~~
justherefortart
Well it was based off Harvard's yearbook which was called facebook. At least
that was my understanding.

~~~
SippinLean
A "face book" is a generic term for a student directory.

~~~
justherefortart
Back in my day we just called it the student directory. Didn't have photos in
any I'd seen as a kid/college student, those were only in yearbooks.

------
yuhong
Personally I don't like the current debt-based economy where almost infinite
money can be printed in the first place.

------
chrisseldo
I hope the posting of this article isn't some insinuation of FB's fate.

~~~
influx
Why do you hope that? Are you a FB shareholder?

~~~
chrisseldo
Perhaps I should rephrase to what I meant to imply: I find it funny that
people think Facebook is going away / will fade into irrelevancy.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
The whole point of posting this article is that people felt exactly the same
about MySpace, Ford, Atari...

~~~
onychomys
Ford sells hundreds of thousands of vehicles a month. I wouldn't put them in
quite the same boat as MySpace.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Cars also get replaced regularly and have practically no network effect (for
the typical user).

Every time your Tacoma frame rusts out you're presented with an opportunity to
switch to a differen't company's product.

~~~
emodendroket
They may not have much network effect, but I am quite confident that a lot of
people buy the same manufacturer's car (or, hell, even the latest model of the
same vehicle) every time they are in the market for a new car. Like, there are
people who just buy a new Camry every four or five years.

~~~
isostatic
If a $MAKE hasn't given you any problems, then you may well go back to it. If
I were to buy a small car I'd buy a nissan micra -- I've owned two and both
were really good.

However if $MAKE has given you problems, then you're likely to avoid it.

~~~
emodendroket
Of course there is a limit, but I feel like many shoppers do not seriously
compare very many cars and sometimes brand loyalty trumps even the most
negative experiences.

Either way, it means that Ford's position is pretty secure for a while.

------
clairity
many years ago, i had bet a friend that facebook would begin to decline in
2016. seems like i might have been off by two years. _shucks_

my bet was predicated on (1) people realizing the insidiousness of facebook,
(2) the cool kids moving on to other platforms, and (3) mobile communications
being omnipresent and eclipsing facebook (solid but not earth-shatteringly
original reasons).

i'd attribute the demises of friendster and myspace primarily to #2 (with
underlying product and marketing issues exacerbating it). but more than that
was required to topple the massive network effects moat that facebook built.
notice that it wasn't another social network (e.g., snapchat) that will have
overtaken it but rather a confluence of other issues striking in concert (some
self-inflicted).

~~~
tomhschmidt
What exactly is declining? Their MAU, Time Spent, # Advertisers, and Revenue
numbers are all increasing
([https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/facebook-2-billion-
users/](https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/facebook-2-billion-users/)). Maybe
they're just declining in eyes of SV bubble residents.

~~~
ajkjk
Well, their widespread acceptability seems to be declining, as indicated by
all these articles and quittings lately. Presumably widespread quitting of
users would only come after, not before, some high profile upsets and
mistakes.

And # of Advertisers and Revenue are proportional to how people think they're
doing, not how they're actually doing, and would presumably only decline after
a mass exodus.

~~~
emodendroket
Yes, people are grumbling about them, but how many of them are leaving?

