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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).
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
I think you're vastly overestimating the number of people who actually care enough and know enough to do this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Google Trends.
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
"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
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.