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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.......
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!
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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!
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!
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.
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.
You may want to find a new line of reasoning. I think that argument is more likely to turn someone against freedom than it is to win someone over to MySpace.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 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!
"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'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.
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.
"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