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MySpace's Melting Makes Murdoch Mad
Barence writes "Facebook has overtaken rival social network MySpace for the first time — provoking an angry outburst from Rupert Murdoch, the man who paid $580m for MySpace only three years ago."
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I've read the linked article a few times and I'm not sure where there is anything to indicate he is mad. Nice use of alliteration though. I did find this article about the difference in growth between the two sites and it has a lot more information about the situation in general, though nothing about Murdoch's reaction. I couldn't find anything more about that - like where and when he said the things they say he said, what the tone was, etc.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Maybe he should rant about it on his Facebook page.
Good.. Bad.. I'm the guy with the gun.
Facebook is on it's way out too. I stopped using it when the plethora of stupid dirty looking applications starting taking over everybody's pages making facebook look more like myspace.
Now facebook is even spammier than myspace, with hundreds of applications I can't stand, and all their invites. I have to "add" an application in order to view it. I don't want to view it. I don't want a "drink" invitation, or a "pirate" invitation. Leave me alone.
This is why I quit Facebook
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
People are tired of being linked to a page that has crappy layout, crappy embedded video or music that plays automatically, is full of lolspeak and/or textype, and is so random that it makes a schizophrenic feel confused.
oh wait.......
Oh the joys of investing in a fad. I find it hard to feel for Murdoch. The years when such ventures were risk-free no-brainers are ca. 10 years past (if they ever existed).
I nearly feel bad for the guy; except that I don't, and wish nothing but further business failures for him and his various companies.
Eat hot shit, Rupert!
Rupert Murdoch has made his millions by becoming a shill for the State. That's a given. He promotes big, lovely government, and he was paid well by the Powers that Be.
MySpace, though, is the anti-thesis of government. It's about freedom. People don't necessarily realize that, but that's the end result from allowing people to freely communicate, gather and entertain.
Murdoch overpaid for something that can probably never make a reasonable profit. It's like trying to commercialize peer groups. It doesn't work. Murdoch screwed up time and time again by not providing for correct advertising focus to the customers of MySpace. The advertising doesn't work. It's a broken system. Facebook is no better, in my opinion, but at least they're providing services that a slightly upper crust clientele wants.
The future of the web is not about large-scale sites dominating over tiny ones. It's the whole long tail situation: the big sites are mere portals to other sites, and the sites that fail to do this properly will be hurt significantly by trying to be the big boy on campus. Those who made money by being shills for the State will also suffer (Fox, MSNBC, CNN, etc). The long tail is getting longer, and thicker, and stronger, and it will become superior in financial clout than the few large sites that used to be powerful. Even slashdot (probably NOT a shill for the State) is likely finding pain as smaller sites/blogs/forums are grabbing a larger chunk of the pie.
So what should Murdoch do? Break down MySpace. Don't be one big site on one big platform: expand to being tiny widgets and plugins that are part of the long tail of tiny blogs and forums and personal webpages. Let people host their MySpace widget on their platform, and send traffic back to MySpace as MySpace sends traffic to billions of tiny sites. MySpace can brand the widget with their own advertising or marketing clout because it'll be a part of millions or billions of sites.
But Murdoch doesn't understand this. Murdoch doesn't want to. He thought "Ohh, billions of teenagers and young adults, we'll sell iPod thingies to them and make trillions! And then we'll push the Iraq War on them subconsciously."
You failed Rupert. Go away.
If this guy can't recognize a silly trend without business fundamentals, he deserves to be parted with his money. Just like the thugs on Wall street have been telling small time investors for years. It's nobody's fault but your own if you can't evaluate the business potential of a company when you invest. Perhaps Mr Murdoch should stick to index funds....
No more pirate/vampire/werewolf invitations, please...
Facebook started off a great site, fast, clean design, it's now incredibly slow and hard todo anything, whereas myspace actually is improving.
Still waiting for a mybook, or facespace to integrate the messaging.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
Even if it is a REALLY big flash in a REALLY big pan, how can they not realize it is just that.
it is the mark of the moron
much like having an @aol.com address
it helps me to decide within 2-3 milliseconds whether a person is a tool or not
to this I say: long live MySpace, long may you live!
I thought he was already mad. Hmmm.
Invenio via vel creo
How could a UI disaster that informs a user who has problems logging in that "you must be logged in to do that?" and that lacks any kind of official published API possibly win?
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
friendster
xanga
geocities
tripod
etc.
and don't worry about facebook, in a few short years, it too will be a hasbeen, replaced by whatever site is the new trend
social networking sites are nothing but trends. they have the limelight for a few years, then they fade. think of them as the bell bottoms and ankle warmers and member's only jackets of the web. here today, master of everything, gone tomorrow, utterly forgotten
so how do you make money off of them?
you make money off of social networking sites by becoming extremely powerful, then seducing some tragically unhip media conglomerate to buy you for gabazillions, then you sleep all day and party all night
so congratulations murdoch, you have a place in "new media" after all: the patsy left holding the bag
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That investing extremely large sums of money based on the momentary whims of teenagers and early twenty-somethings wasn't such a great idea? The winds of the internet can shift in an instant, and it seems like Murdoch hasn't caught on to that yet. Of course, it won't be long before The Next Big Thing comes along, and Facebook will be in the same spot that MySpace is right now.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
All alliterations are actually anterior assonance, after all. The article wasn't nearly as entertaining as the title...
Websites without paying customers aren't worth that much (base your valuation on current advertising revenue only gentlemen) especially those that are free and cater to a new generation of teenagers (renews every 4 years or so). Seriously he should be mad that he overpaid.
MySpace is already slow with the existing demand. If they manage to gain more visitors, the situation will only get worse. Add some servers and cleanup the horrible HTML.
Facebook and Myspace are both cr@p (as all the other imitator sites are also cr@p). Did my statement of fact make you more happy Rupert, or are you just sore on loosing all that money?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
its called craigslist
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
FlashFaceSpace. It will combine the wonderful-nonannoying-awesomeness that is Flash, the unobtrusiveness of Facebook applications, and the customizability of MySpace to create the ultimate social networking site of DEATH. This will blow MySpace, Facebook and every other social networking site out of the water.
The fact that the site was developed using Cold Fusion should have signaled the first sign of its impending demise.
Murdoc's corporation, owns many dozens of news papers, magazines, TV and radio stations.
He just bought the Dow Jones Corporation, including the Wall Street Journal, for fsck's sake!
You would think that he has enough experience and market knowledge to know to to spend half a billion dollars on something targeted at 15 year olds who wear pants made for the opposite gender.
Kids change fads more often than they change their underwear some times. Eventually, some of those grow up, go to college, and want something a little more serious and less... dumb.
Then they abandon myspace.
Oh well. Better luck next time, dude!
facts get in the way of a good bit of sensationalism.
...that's all that these suckers are interested in.
Webcams came and went away. Napster came and went away. Blogging came and will fade into dust when even the last blogger on earth realizes that there are better things to do in life than hobby-journalism. (Like, being paid as a jornalist, for example) And myspace and facebook will go away, too.
("Go away" in the sense of being taken over by morons and becoming uninteresting to anyone with a real life.)
Hey, FaceBook isn't mentioned in this song, so it can't be cool enough to survive :-)
(And as a FaceBook user ... as soon as something as slick comes along that actively ... I'll jump ship.)
manages the flood of craptastic add-ins
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
If myspace pages didn't suck so bad, there wouldn't be a problem. I don't even consider Facebook and MySpace rivals. Facebook is so far beyond MySpace, it isn't even worth discussing.
Facebook's days are numbered, I'm sure. Something will come along to replace it in the next couple of years...unless it is able to evolve.
So myspace fell behind facebook (or the other way 'round, don't bother answering, it doesn't matter).
Ok. So what? What did Murdoch hope to get out of his purchase? An insight in peer group development and what people interact with what people? Paying half a billion for that is kinda stupid, you can get that cheaper by pondering for an hour about it. Quite nice hour rates, even my lawyer makes less...
Let's be reasonable here, community sites like that don't give you ANYTHING. They don't give you a marketing tool, telling you what people are interested in what, because people lie due to knowing that they'll else be bombarded with ads. They don't give you an advertising platform, because people are getting fed up with pointless ads and use ad blockers and ignore lists liberally. They don't give you a tool to inform people for the same reason, people liken "information" with advertising more and more (possibly due to some informational broadcasts taking the form of ads more and more, thanks to Mr. Murdoch himself).
So what gets Rup ruffled the wrong way? It's not like that toy (and it ain't much more than that) had any value in the first place. Well, we know now that it has a price, and we know now that the old saying "not everything that has a value has a price" can be reversed, but aside of that, nothing was gained.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
MySpace is hideous so that's not surprising. Facebook, OTOH, while better looking simply isn't intuitive. For all of the talk about "applications" I largely don't use them because they're not obvious.
Having that statement applied TO Rupert Murdoch, rather than BY Rupert Murdoch.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
the error is in how murdoch quantified what he was purchasing, the perception of what he was actually getting for his money: the error is in thinking you are buying a permanent piece of major real estate on the web. no, what you are buying is a major marketing and branding tool for a few years... which is indeed still worth $500 million
for his $500 million, he gets a few years of ad revenue, some "showing soon" movie marketing hype, some cross-branding possibilities, steering a few kids towards a fox reality show, etc. but after a few years run, the site is worth bupkus
as for facebook's $15 billion, all i can do is laugh. $15 billion?! insane. because facebook too will be worth the gum on my sneaker in a few years. facebook is worth what myspace is worth: $500 million
zuckerman or zuckerberg or whatever the kids name: he should have sold facebook out. hes going to be like that friendster guy is today in a few years: the friendster guy daily kicks himself in the ass for not selling out when he could have. zuckerdude is thinking he has the next google on his hands. no, he has the next xanga. sell out kid, asap
thats how you really make money on social networking sites: you sell out to established media conglomerates, and then go play frisbee. to keep a hold of the site, and thinking you are going to become a permanent internet portal, like google, is hubris, arrogance, egotism. unless you are planning to seque into becoming a search engine, and somehow actually take out google... heh, googd luck. but that's the only sound strategy to take if you plan on keeping the social networking site rather than selling out, upping the ante and going for the diamond ring
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Invest a little in someone to make MySpace something people want to visit, instead of something that people go out of their way to avoid. Well, I go out of my way to avoid it, when I've got a choice fo going to a MySpace page or trying another Google search I'll generally do another search.
I mean, not only is it slow to fetch all the images and painful to navigate but it's about the only thing that's uglier than Apple's "Platinum File Sharing".
Of course your site is going to eventually fail when it is constantly linked to online predators, and the "security" is built on top of Real Ultimate Freedom(tm). Compared to Facebook where you have to "link" to each other in greater detail, before actually being able to do much. I would assume that predators don't have that sort of patience. I don't really know, I don't have a myspace page. Just facebook.
So Rupert is mad because the primary users of his product (12-18 year olds) turns out to be a demographic that has no money? Sounds like somebody skipped some sort of business analysis and jumped on the proverbial band wagon a tad too quickly.
What with cApSsPeAk, 15 year olds writing journal entries about something no one actually cares about, letting anyone who isn't a webdev edit their page so that I have to deal with stupid cursors and blinking glittery images that say "princess", display names that are quotes from some shitty song with terrible lyrics, some post-grunge emo band starting up when I visit someone's page and having to attack the pause button before I have to be subjected to it... ...and pretty much everyone I know having the same experience, is it any wonder that MySpace is dying and losing an upper-hand in the ad-selling business?
There are mountains to cross for those that are willing.
As I point out occasionally, social networking sites have a life cycle, like good nightclubs and restaurants. They start up, if they're lucky, the cool people go there. They grow, they get too many losers, the cool people leave, and they decline.
Once upon a time AOL was cool. That was a long time ago. Geocities and EZboard were cool for a while. Remember them? Nerve and Tribe were once cool; now they're dying. Now it's Myspace's turn. Today, to a teenager, Myspace is what your little brother uses. Social networking sites have a shelf life of maybe five years.
This is reflected in traffic stats, which is where I got a clear picture of this effect. The Alexa traffic statistics were useful for seeing when a site peaked. Unfortunately, the Alexa people recently "widgetized" their site, and they broke the "Max" button on their traffic graphs, so you can't currently see historical data for past years. Maybe they'll fix it.
The Next Cool Thing will probably be phone-based.
I don't know how bad Facebook is, but think of every story, every complaint you've ever had about Myspace, technology-wise.
It's worse than that.
Simple example: Trying to pull tour dates from Myspace. Too much to expect that they'd have a working iCal feed, or that they'd put hCal on the page. Fine, we'll scrape the HTML, no problem...
No, the real WTF moment was the month (I think, might've been more) during which none of the calendars worked.
People joke about Twitter being unable to scale, but really, you'd think with the amount of money Myspace pulls in, they'd be able to hire one good tech person? I'm guessing that's a major reason people are going to Facebook.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
A lot of the comments I'm seeing assume that Murdoch somehow lost money on the deal. In reality after he bought MySpace: "On August 8, 2006, search engine Google signed a $900 million deal to provide a Google search facility and advertising on MySpace."
And I'm sure that's not the only way MySpace has made Murdoch even richer.
In the article, he describes Facebook as less of a community than MySpace and more of a directory. Any other feelings about Facebook and MySpace aside, I think he's pretty wrong about that. Facebook's architecture allows different members of the site to be linked based on a large variety of dimensions spanning the users provided interests, network memberships, and other criteria. In my experience, MySpace's "social networking" capabilities are much less robust.
That's always been used as a significant metric, and I've never understood why. This article is a perfect example. 120million unique visitors in a month. If we assume that's a peak... and that it's been trending generally upward but not dramatically, it's not too hard to extrapolate at least 2 billion "unique hits" in 2 years. The problem with that is that there are significantly less than 2 billion people people online. So what do those numbers really mean?
.. and a sellout to News Corp, no less. That alone probably drove away much of their clientele, a base which seems to be young-progressive as opposed to Murdoch's right-leaning fascist inclinations.
Personally, I hope the exceedingly greedy and decrepit Murdoch never learns the ropes of new media and pisses all his money away trying to get a piece of that pie. Too much to wish for though.
I've had no end of trouble with MySpace. I'm not able to prevent my music from playing when you load my page, even though that's how I set it in my profile. I've always allowed downloads of my MP3s, but at some point they stopped being downloadable. I had to delete them all and re-upload them to get the downloads back.
I have actually found MySpace pages that had been customized in such a way as to make FireFox crash just by loading the page!
My only complaint about FaceBook is that it doesn't allow for downloading MP3s - but that's a lack of a desired feature, and not an actual bug.
Most young people these days are trying out both. I don't think it takes much time for them all to figure out which one is better.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
what i mean by that is, your generation bought into facebook, and the generation after you hasn't bought into it yet. they will be exposed to some other options, and eventually congeal around one of the other dozens of new muscular contenders to facebook that are always out there
the obvious question is, why don't they just use facebook?
the obvious answer to that is, everyone wants to be special, and part of the "in" group. and the "in" group always uses something new and exclusive and different. its a false sense of superiority, but its a false sense of human superiority that is a basic human character flaw we all share: the need to feel special: "oh, i'm not on facebook, i'm on {xyz}." oooh {xyz}! so cool and new and different and exciting!
welcome to the reality of social groups and cliques
and so, as soon as something goes mainstream, the search begins for the next new "it" tool. in endless succession, for all time
but facebook has al lthese great apps you say?
dude: it doesn't matter if facebook has the best suite of online social netowrking and contact management apps that have ever been built or ever could be built on the web for all time. facebook has gone mainstream. that is all that is needed to know to announce its eventual inevitable decline and death knell
the reason that this law doesn't apply to sites like google is that google isn't a SOCIAL NETWORKING site. a social networking site must be constantly fed new blood, or it dies. google climbed to the top of the internet search heap, and stayed there, simply because it did a better job at search. google would have never had existed were yahoo or altavista improve its search. to defeat google, someone just has to build better search (if possible)
to defeat facebook, meanwhile, all one has to do is wait. wait and watch one of those little scrawny weeds in the corner there to grow into a tree
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
everything, all sites, including google, fade and die
the question is, as you ride the wave of success to the top, how do you know when to get off the ferris wheel and claim your prize? how do you when you have peaked?
of course, no one knows, no one can know. but as you ride that tiny ripple into a tsunami of success, you begin to think your own shit smells like roses. you begin to believe your own hype. mainly because everyone you meet feeds it to you
such that, your own ability to perceive your true measure of success gets warped and kaleidoscopes, and you begin to take on the stink of megalomania
no, the thing to do, with something like say, youtube, which was started in early 2005 and sold for gabazillions in late 2006, is to indeed, sell out
because at the point the youtube dudes sold out, the ratio of the amount of reward they were getting to the amount of effort they exerted was already so huge, it would be stupid not to sell out
sure, they could have kept going with youtube, just as you say
but luckily they took of whiff of their shit, and noticed there were no roses to be smelled. good for them
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Your links are about a lawsuit against a local affiliate of the Fox Television Network, not Fox News. A couple of local TV reporters didn't like the way their station edited a story they did, so they sued and lost. The story never aired.
There's no need to misrepresent the truth in order to criticize Fox News. There's plenty of real stuff they actually do that you can criticize.
You have 1 new invitation (25% of 3.5 MB loaded) but you must be logged in to do that!
(note the completely ambiguous use of MB that might mean million-byte or 2^20 depending on whether Murdoch and his code-slaves are RAIDophiles or TCP/IP fanatics)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
FTFA
He might as well have said it was not a real website. That kind of talk is crazy, but Steve Ballmer managed to outdo Mrudoch for cluelessness and call him an idiot at the same time.
Moneymen destroy cool concept, 50% chance of rain, news at 10PM.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You paid 580 million for the worst piece of crap ever to grace the web...what did you expect?
there are 10,000 wannabe sites that no one visits today
linkedin and craigslist are a product of serendipity and luck as much as good programming, well positioned to satisfy an unspoken need, etc.
such that if you wind up at the incredibly long odds of being offered a large sum of money for a much smaller amount of work one code, for gods sake, dont be a fool and take the pile of money
meanwhile you advise at that point to stick it out to reach for even much longer odds instead
that's called pushing your luck, hubris
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
myspace will become the next geocities, a stale linkfarm with ancient content. facebook will follow a few years after. social websites can only be popular for so long before they're no longer the "in" "cool" thing.
For all the crap and propaganda his news corp spews out...would anyone care to argue that FOX is the single worst place to get information, at least "accurate" information.
I hope he goes bankrupt.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The lack of proper calendar formats on MySpace is a deliberate feature, much like the way that notification emails from MySpace omit the actual details (i.e., the message someone sent you, whose birthday you're being reminded of), to oblige you to log in, click through an interstitial ad and view some more ads.
If MySpace allowed you to see your data through any means other than their ugly ad-plastered web pages, they'd lose ad impressions.
Ha hA!
Google Trends.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=190286&cid=15656478
someone figures out how to search better than them. that's what brought google here: they did search better than the juggernauts of 1999: yahoo, altavista, etc.
if google is smart, they will remain focused on their core competency, and not get distracted with secondary pursuits, and have their entire relevancy stolen from them from under their feet. but the thing is, google is human endeavour. all human endeavours make mistake and fade
it may indeed take a decade or two, but there will come a time when google's lustre will fade to black. perhaps it will be in a time when the very idea of "internet search" is an antiquated concept. what i just said, that "internet search" might lose its relevancy, may seem to put the date of google's death many decades from now, but it actually brings google's date of death much closer
if you consider the pace of technological change, that could be only a decade away, when the concept of "internet search" is antiquated. you may consider that statement preposterous, but lets put it this way: if someone came up to you in 1988 and said the most darling company in the entire world in 2008 would be dedicated to something called "internet search", you would just stare at them like they were a maniac
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Can it be?
"* blending opinion with news and calling it objective
putting only one political view on the air and calling themselves "balanced"
reporting as factual news (and almost verbatim) the "talking points" released by the GOP"
I hate to tell you this, Anonymous Coward, but people have been blending opinion with News since people have been doing news. Humans aren't Vulcans, they aren't robots. They have opinions, and that's always going to color journalism to one extent or another. In your righteous anger, I don't see you condeming Keith Olbermann and MSNBC. I don't see you condemning Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert (yes, I know they have comedy shows, but face it, more twentysomethings get their news from those two than from CNN or FOX or the New York Times. Jon Stewart's protests aside, he is a major news source now).
You seem to be mainly pissed that an opinion you don't like is popular at one network. That's mighty greedy of you, considering that every other broadcast/cable news source is considered either centrist or left leaning. And before you start bitching about Talk Radio, it's audience isn't as big, and the fault of Air America's failure isn't due to any conspiracy; even liberal listeners think the network sucks. You guys fix it, and then get back to us on talk radio. Besides, you do have NPR, which is pretty popular.
Meantime, where conservatives once had a majority of popular Internet outlets, liberals have since caught up and surpassed them. Academia also tends to be more liberal, and academia is all about the spread of ideas. There are also as many liberal political magazines as their are conservative ones. And where conservatives once had more think-tanks than liberals, that gap has disappeared as well. MoveOn.org is arguably more influential than the AEI or the Heritage Foundation now. So it's not like liberal ideas can't get a fair shot in being heard. Liberal views and ideas are heard everywhere, arguably in more venues than conservative ones.
If you don't like Fox, don't watch it. It's one network. It's not like your choices are limited. And it seems like you're mainly pissed that they're allowed to have an audience at all.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
"Just look at the Dan Rather incident, he wasn't even responsible for that content, and he got shit canned for it. Rather's job on the show was to read the news, whatever was given to him and do the show, shows like that never have the anchor do much beyond that and a few interviews."
That's a crock, sir. Dan Rather was not an innocent bystander in the reporting of that story. He wasn't a stiff mannequin that simply read what the teleprompter told him to say. He was deeply involved in the preparation of that story, and got fired because he refused to refute it, even when evidence proved the documents were faked with a word processor. And to this day, he still defends the writers and fact checkers of that story, all evidence that they screwed up to the contrary.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
... Facebook is "winning" because, among other things, it has a cleaner and more attractive interface. And I don't know about anyone else, but I don't get constantly barraged with model-wannabe friend requests on Facebook. The aspiring models and amateur porn stars have all but made MySpace unusable. MySpace's administration can't seem to filter them out fast enough.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
no one works hard at anything without their eyes on some idea of profit. you have a weak model of human nature and what motivates it
absolutely every single bit of human progress in all of human history was motivated by money, sex, or power. we're not ascetic monks you know. well, even then, even a monk transcibing letters in chaste poverty still has an idea of "profit" in his mind: power over his own humanity
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://www.arsebook.org/
Incredible Hulk, playing now! Scantily clad teenage girls! Incoming message from webcam whore! Want to see my nude pics that myspace banned!!!!111
Annoyed yet? I was. I don't use myspace anymore.
MySpace only got better on one level: performance. It used to be terribly slow (last year I had lots of timeouts)...
But:
Most pages are still an ugly mess (only the page owners are to blame about that, but maybe they shouldn't have too much options to customize the look?). Each page you visit you have to search for the functions that each page has, it's just presented in a different way.
A total lack of features you would expect for such a site: like a way to put "friends" into categories (like: real friends, artists I really like, artists that requested to be added,...)
Try opening a few tabs with MySpace pages (clicking on friends/links from one page) and you have songs from all those pages downloading and playing at the same time. ...
They likely mean "corresponding to a real person" by unique visitor, not being unique to the period. If we assume 200 million unique visitors in a year, 120 million of those people could be visiting every month, thus 120 million unique visitors a month. The other 80 million visitors from that year are the sensible ones.
Multiple browsers can skew the figure. If a myspace user has a work computer, a home computer, and an iPhone, he will appear as 3 unique visitors unless he is logged in.
Back in the day, I was amused by a criticism of Gamecube's relative lack of appeal versus the other consoles that said (paraphrase): "You can't win with games that your average high school boy would be embarrassed to be caught liking." In much the same way: MySpace can't win with an image that 30-somethings would be embarrassed to be associated with. Maybe it's just the crowd I run with, but if you're 30+, there's a stigma attached to having a MySpace page, somewhat akin to wearing a letterman's jacket or greek letters around long after that life chapter has passed. Unless you're promoting your band.
Jon Stewart's insistence that TDS is a 'fake news show' has the exact same effect as someone saying on Slashdot, "I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but..."
I don't have ratings numbers, but I'd bet that TDS ratings go up a point every time he mutters that phrase. It is just like the consistent, tried and true +3 insightful that gets thrown onto comments here.
I never liked Myspace much and only joined to monitor what certain people were posting. I replaced my profile with an anti-Fox message and logged off permanently when Murdoch bought it up, so it makes me happy to see this site wither. It was always ugly and poorly designed anyway.
Of course then Microsoft bought 15% of Facebook so I've eliminated most of my usage of that as well. Bit of a loss, but these things are big time-wasters anyway.
Remind us again how "you" are not another sockpuppet.
In your righteous anger, I don't see you condeming Keith Olbermann and MSNBC. I don't see you condemning Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert (yes, I know they have comedy shows, but face it, more twentysomethings get their news from those two than from CNN or FOX or the New York Times.
False equivilancy alert. Olbermann has angry rants, so he's the same as Bill O'Reilly. Al Franken complains about Republicans, so he's the same as Ann Coulter. Russ Feingold is far from Dick Cheney on the political spectrum, so he's as far out left as Cheney is to the right.
It's all bullshit. O'Reilly gets angry when people walk into a Target in December and see a sign that says "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". Olbermann gets angry when our government tortures people. Al Franken mocks O'Reilly for lying about winning a Peabody award. Ann Coulter mocks 911 widows for being glory hounds. Russ Feingold is solidly with the majority of the American public on issue after issue, yet he's the fringe politician. It comes from a desire to find balance where none exists.
You seem to be mainly pissed that an opinion you don't like is popular at one network.
Straw man. The problem with Fox isn't opinions, it's that lying and making shit up is part of their business model. And the other networks treat them as a serious news network, so Fox can start talking about some bullshit story and the other networks will pick it up.
and the fault of Air America's failure isn't due to any conspiracy
Newspapers owned by Rupert Murdock, Richard Mellon Scaife and Sun Moon have lost billions of dollars. Why oh why are conservatives so terrible at business?
Besides, you do have NPR, which is pretty popular.
Ah, the old "if it's not right wing it must be liberal" fallacy that invariably gets applied to NPR.
Academia also tends to be more liberal
Ditto.
And where conservatives once had more think-tanks than liberals, that gap has disappeared as well. MoveOn.org is arguably more influential than the AEI or the Heritage Foundation now.
Uh, no. You couldn't even name a liberal think tank, you named an activist group and called it a think tank instead.
If you don't like Fox, don't watch it. It's one network. It's not like your choices are limited.
It's the impact on the rest of the media, stupid. If the rest of the networks treated Fox News as the rag it is, there wouldn't be a problem. But since they've treated it as a legitimate news source, right wing propaganda makes it's way through Rush or Drudge to Fox News, and from there it goes to CNN and MSNBC and print media and so on.
And it seems like you're mainly pissed that they're allowed to have an audience at all.
Liar.
His chief competitor is valued at 15 Billion. He bought MySpace for 580 Million. They were neck to neck in April. Obviously I'm not a business man because it sounds to me like he got a deal.
Granted the numbers are flat at 5% growth compared to Facebook more than doubling. And, it's unlikely Murdoch would ever listen to customer complaints and do what he wants instead. Like shoveling adverts down their throats and charging for what was once free. So what if he bought into a business he knows nothing about that requires a lot of customer attention and satisfaction who aren't falling over themselves for the privilege of giving him money. A business paradigm where dictator types are mocked at rather than feared...
I take that back, he got screwed.
-[d]-
The URLs for MySpace user pages are nicer/shorter though.
He's at least 98 now isn't he? I'm amazed he he's even heard of the printing press.
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
Ooh I love illiteration!
"Slashdot Sometimes Shows Sad Stories, So Samah Says"
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
anyone who pays 580 million for a website is ill advised and doesn't understand the fickle nature of digital social networking. heh anyway it's loose change...
What?
I don't see a comparison (resemblance) between MySpace and CyWorld. I prefer CW MUCH more than I do MySpace. However, I don't very often visit my CW account, but I go to it more than I do my MySpace account.
CyWorld is fun, and maybe I'm partial to it because I'm studying Hangul (Korean) and have an affinity to Korean things...
Speaking of Korean things (hint to the mods having an urge to slam "off-topic" on me, this is an aside here), I would like to have the Samsung Instinct, but I have NO intention of getting into another 2-year contract at this time, don't want to pay $200 for a phone, then wait 10 WEEKS for the rebate, am tired of billing issues, and so on.
If Metro had sexier phones and better coverage, i'd go to them. Maybe I'll check out Credo or something else, but I want my options open past Feb of the next year.
But back to CyWorld.... CyWorld probably has more pervasive activity per registered user, if i understand correctly.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Where tomorrow's fad is already old. Which makes it very imprudent to pay a nine-digit sum of money for it.
pleasebeyoutubepleasebeyoutubepleasebeyoutubepleasebeyoutubepleasebeyoutube
Damn.
Was anyone else hoping for a YouTube link to Rupert Murdoch frothing at the mouth and screaming "Facebook ! Facebook ! Facebook !" ?
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
I agree with a lot of you. I hate going to my friend's page on facebook and writing on their wall which takes 10 minutes to scroll to usually because they are retarded and have just experienced the internet first hand and think they are being internet savvy by installing every application possible. I actually created a group on facebook called "The number of facebook applications owned is inversely proportional to intelligence", feel free to join.
Simply having an account on one of these sites is grounds for immediate termination.
Everyone with any sense can see these sites, and the people that use them are just fickle and will move on to the next cool thing, not wanting to be uncool...
Bebo is already uncool, as well as Facebook, MySpace, MyFace and whatever else..
if you've been around the IT world for more than 10 years, you've seen them come and go... MySpace will be no different...
People are starting to grow tired of it as its novelty is wearing off - I mean seriously - how long can you post silly little pictures on other people profiles before it becomes boring?
What do you think I mean? I went to us.cyworld.com clicked a few random profiles and quickly closed my browser. Each profile looked exactly like a Myspace profile (complete with annoying music, ugly backgrounds, multiple videos, etc.), The only thing I saw different was this "room" at the top. Maybe the Korean version is better, I didn't look at that.
Q.
Myspace, Facebook and every other dating site or "social networking" stop shop all basiclly have the same code, do the same things, and any 20 year old with a half wit understanding can create websites in a weekend. But, the real reason that these sites are worth so much is 2 parts.
1. the personal data that they collected from the mass public who signed up. This data shows all kinda expensive statistics that the big boys want.
2. the adversting, the amount of ads that can get to the user base.
Now that it's all said and done, look at these sites now, I checked out a myspace page like a week ago and it took like 5 minutes to load cause of all the ads, the embedded music, videos, links to pictures, and just crap. With all those loop holes, I'm surprised people are not hacked as much as what is being reported.
Since you put it like that.... I now realize I overlooked your point. Yep, CW *is* chock-full of content, colors and such. What cool is that if you have acorns (CW's currency) you can buy stereos and other things for your room or for your friends. You can give yourself a stylable avatar...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Let's all turn off d2 and put some google adds on /.!
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.