As I was breezing across everyone on Twitter that I follow talking about what they are eating tonight and what party they will attend at SXSW (South by Southwest Conference) and very very little about any content from the conference. I thought I'd send out a tweet mocking these folks because, yes, I'm jealous, and yes I'm hungry. In doing so, I use a firefox add-in called yoono which allows you to update several social groups all at once. And of course MySpace failed to update. I thought to myself, why am I even posting there, I haven't used myspace in months and so I disabled it from yoono. I wanted to post an article tonight so I was browsing different technology news sites when I came across an article that sparked a bit of irony in my day, and that was an article by Emma Barnett with Telagraph.co.uk entitled, "New MySpace chiefs plan major relaunch."
The gist of the article was that the new chiefs in charge will be relaunching myspace to try and recover some of the loss of potential users being swallowed up by Facebook and Twitter. Their plan, to foscus on "content discovery". Content discovery will be the flagship of myspace will put more focus on sharing things such as applications and music and ...games I guess?
Ok, so I realize that I'm not a spring chicken anymore. I'm in my early forties, and quite frankly every time I log into myspace I get a part annoyed, part sea sick from all the junk "content" that is hitting me in the face. The ads..my goodness the ads, myspace is like a visual representation of my email spam folder. Perhaps all of this "excitement" is for a younger crowd.
So the question that I have to ponder to myself is, will better content sharing, aka content discovery save myspace? Maybe...maybe not.
I have to say I originally was on myspace and then later facebook. Facebook for me in comparison to myspace, was like coming out of a winter blizzard into a warm cozy cabin with a nice blazing warm fire in the fireplace. I look around and there is all my friends from high school, college, work, etc..just there hanging out, being cool. I think some of that is Facebook maintains a sterile environment in that unlike myspace you can completely hack your page freely. You go to any page on Facebook, it looks the same. You go to most myspace page and your likely to see pink elephants dancing across bright yellow background with white text making your eyes want to pop straight out of your head and then ask the question, "Who is this crazy person?!?!?"
That aside myspace has always allowed users to express themselves and certainly that was the initial appeal I think. However, they've never provided a 'good' way to build their themes. It is done via hacking the profile form and overriding the stylesheet by injecting your own inline css styles. This is known by every myspace user and of course why would they police this as it is part of the appeal to most on myspace. What I don't get is why don't they open it up? Why don't they allow people to easily design their sites and then provide attractive layouts.
Facebook didn't exactly capture the market because it was cool. They dominated the market because they understand the basis of why people are at their site....'everyone else is there, so I guess I have to' effect. They literally spread themselves like a computer virus, politely asking all of your friends to check out a great photo I have and by the way sign up to see it. Now that you're here, here is a hundred other people you used to know and forgot about. It's initial appeal is intoxicating.
So where does Myspace go from here to regain it's thrown of social media. It isn't all bad in my book. I still have an account and have no inclination of getting rid of it (again). In fact, it's music service is top knotch. In my oppinion main stream music doesn't catch my interest anymore due to it's lack of anything good. So a place like myspace showcases a lot of independent music and allows that creative expression to propogate. That is certainly their key and that is I believe what the new Cheifs are banking on in allowing users to have that freedom of expression that other sites don't. The question is can they divide the "content spam" from their "content discovery".
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