Oh, MySpace. I used to religiously log in and stay on for days and days. Now, the word MySpace isn't even in my vocabulary. What happened?! It was all about customizable pages, having your “top” friends, and snooping around on your friends’ pages to read comments. For me it was graduating high school and finally getting a Facebook. At first I hated Facebook for its lack of customizable image but, as I grow older it’s what I appreciate most about it. Juggling class, work, social life, and family life I don’t have the time or motivation to sit at a computer and mess around with fonts and layouts. Facebooks simplicity is why I still have an active account and why my MySpace was left in the dust.
Erica, I went through a similar story with Myspace, from being there daily for countless hours and getting creative with the layouts, videos, pictures and spying on friends and strangers. However using html gets pretty tiring and all their ads were "screen consuming". Also, Facebook seemed to be much safer in the beginning because of better privacy system. Also, the whole idea of adding only people that you really knew was better then the "free for all" Myspace philosophy. Pictures tagging was another new thing that attracted me to fb (although later on Myspace copied the idea but it wasn't as good).
ReplyDeleteAs you mention, integration is definitively a key issue, but although Myspace is letting its users sync their accounts with other platforms, what about if other platforms are not interested in doing so? If other services and especially Facebook decide that Myspace cannot give them any additional value, then Myspace doesn't have a chance?
Erica,
ReplyDeleteAs far as a strategy for reviving MySpace, you can say that integration can help get them back on their feet but is it really a come back when you need to depend on other social media sites to build up your profile? There are several avenues that Myspace can take, such as a new look, gearing itself towards musicians and even your integration theory but at the end of the day Myspace will never be what it once was and will definitely have a hard time competing with the big dogs of social media. Society has moved on and it will be quite difficult to get them to go back.
I believe that Myspace’s customizable profile page capabilities where as much connected to its downfall as it was to its success. The fact that users can customize there page with various texts, backgrounds, YouTube videos, music players and so forth is what made it such a hit. It made it the epicenter of self expression and identity for many young kids. At the same time Myspace gave all its users a standard format from which to start of from. What I am saying is that though I understand your argumentation the fact is that customization of one profile page is an option so its difficult to determine the effects of that point.
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