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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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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.......
No kidding, most of the emotion seems to come from the article writer, using terms like 'fumes', 'angry outburst' and 'exasperated'. Does PC Pro actually know Rupert Murdoch enough to know that he's exasperated? They seem to be creating emotion and their own context.
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 of these sorts of things tend to collapse under their own weight. When they start out, they're being created by people who are passionate about it and doing it because they care/enjoy working on it. Then it grows and more people sign up and suddenly there's a potential for some money to be made exploiting it. And that's what happens. The advertisers and spammers move in in full force, deals are made in order to afford all the new servers needed to keep up with traffic, and more and more people keep joining just because their friends told them they should.
The ratio of signal to noise gets skewed to the point where it becomes hard to use, and that combined with the general fickleness of people (especially the younger people that make up a significant portion of the userbase), means that the eyeballs go elsewhere. And at the end of the day, nothing that myspace or facebook or any social networking site does is really all that complicated. There are plenty of other websites out there that are offering ways to communicate with other people.
I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but the churn and turn over seems to be pretty consistent. Before facebook everyone talked about myspace. Before myspace everyone talked about orkut. Before orkut everyone talked about livejournal, etc... All those sites still exist, but today facebook is the one that people are writing headlines about. A couple years down the line some new upstart will be getting all the attention. It's just the way it is, and investing in one of these sites like it's going to be the next amazon or google is pretty silly.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
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.
Neither of them will disappear entirely. One isn't going to crush the other. What's going to happen is that the masses will get tired of both of them, and move on to something new. There will still be some plenty of diehards who refuse to switch, and most of their current users will still keep and check on their accounts every once-in-a-while. But the bulk of the daily traffic will move to some newer, lightweight site that has a couple of novel ideas/features. And that site will be the big thing until it gets too bloated and tired, and then the cycle will repeat itself again.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Speaking of alliteration, I think one reason why MySpace is doomed to play second fiddle is because it's simply harder to say to someone that you put your pictures "on my MySpace page" than "on my Facebook page."
Or maybe I'm just being silly, who knows.
A-Bomb
Having that statement applied TO Rupert Murdoch, rather than BY Rupert Murdoch.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
"The advertisers and spammers move in in full force, deals are made in order to afford all the new servers needed to keep up with traffic"
In my experience, once the profiteering mentality starts, website costs have absolutely nothing to do with increased advertising and commercialisation.
Unless you're running a site like youtube or a warez site etc., server & bandwidth costs are never that significant and a simple unobtrusive banner ad or 'donate' button pays for it. It's people trying to convince investors their website is soon to make billions that leads to the ad spamming and "premium service" rubbish.
"All of these sorts of things tend to collapse under their own weight. When they start out, they're being created by people who are passionate about it and doing it because they care/enjoy working on it. Then it grows and more people sign up and suddenly there's a potential for some money to be made exploiting it. "
You just summed up almost all businesses in general, not just social networking ones.....
"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."
I can't stand Murdoch one bit, but that is just complete & utter rubbish. Who are these "Powers that Be"? the Bavarian Illuminati?
In reality, he's "paid well" by all the suckers like you & me who pay for over-priced Fox, Foxtel, Sky and the plethora of other cable/satellite TV companies he part-owns.
I don't revel in being a defender of big media, but those who pan Fox News never seem to understand what they're criticizing. Fox's primetime lineup consists of personality-driven opinion shows. They've got a right-leaning megalomaniac, a debate show, and a liberal who have control over the content and accuracy of their respective shows. It was a novel thing on a 24/7 news channel when Murdoch started it, and I think it has a place in the discourse. If and when that discourse lacks value, the host is to blame.
Dance like you're hurt, Love like you need money, and work when somebody's watching.
-Scott Adams
Fox news isn't doing anything different from NBC, CBS and ABC. Most notably, exploding trucks, and fake documents. And these are the cases where they got caught.
I'd rather get my news and opinions from people who are knowingly biased, than from people who try to say that they are reporting the news unbiasedly. At least I know the slant, and it makes it easier to dismiss the BS.
The point is, take the news you get with a grain of salt, no matter what your source is. Additionally, get your news from a variety of Points of View, as the truth usually lies (pun intended) in between.
The only idiots I know, get all their news from single sources. They don't listen to alternative views because they can't actually use their heads to filter the news. This goes to both lefties and righties.
I also suggest that if you're railing against "Faux News", that you also rail against the others that end up doing the same thing, manufacturing "news" and "facts".
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Actually, not always. I think Google is a good example of a company that hasn't done that. Their ads are relatively unobtrusive, and even useful. They don't do pop-ups or flashing ads or other irritating things that Myspace and Facebook are doing. Their model is quite sustainable and seems to work.
Sites collapse under their own weight when people get greedy. If the advertising remains reasonable the provider can make money and have some longevity.
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Except that there's consistent support from the hosts on one side of the debate, thus making it invariably two on one.
And that's ignoring that their NEWS shows also show rampant bias, poor to nonexistant fact-checking, and deliberate propaganda reporting, as well as just plain dirty tricks (Such as their constant "Obama/Osama" name slip-ups. I'm not saying that they can't have pundits, I'm saying that their regular newscasters, who are positioned as NEWSCASTERS, are engaging in propaganda and punditry while claiming to be delivering factual and unbiased coverage.
As for Keith Olberman... even while delivering an opinion column, the man has an infinitely better record on vetting his sources and producing factual, correct news than Fox News ever has. That's a bad sign, that is.
What does this have to do with it. They went to court and Newscorp lawyers argued that their program "which they call news" had the right to broadcast information they knew was false and the right to fire journalists with enough integrity to refuse. Whatever else that makes them, it is completely untrustworthy as a source for facts.
If and when that discourse lacks value, the host is to blame.Who picks the hosts? Who fires the people who refuse to tell lies. Sorry, you can't shift the blame away from a corporation that is not trying to inform, but persuade. They just aren't news.
``Republican'' is synonymous with ``American'' now? Who are you, Joe McCarthy?
I actually only have a myspace account, but from the very limited experience I had clicking around on FaceBook, I already know it is a much cleaner platform.
Maybe if Murdoch put some damn effort into fixing Tom's millions of bugs he'd get people to give a crap.
That's because even though the copies he had were forged, all the information in them was accurate.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
And during the day, their shows always have two opposing viewpoints
The regular networks have 2:1 biases in favor of conservative commentators, much less on Fox News. And as someone else pointed out, the hosts are invariably spouting the GOP talking points.
left-wing guests
Democrat != left wing.
And neither are doormats
There are three types of Democrats on Fox: doormats who get humiliated, those who get shouted over, and DINO's like Joe Lieberman.
At least no moreso than, say, MSNBC (hi, Keith Olbermann!).
False equivalency. O'Reilly has rants when stores put up signs saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". Olbermann gets angry when the government lies to us and tortures people. Just a biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit of a difference.