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MySpace Trying To Regain Lost Ground With Games and Music
Over the past several years, MySpace has lost a significant amount of the social networking market to competitors like Facebook. Now, MySpace is trying to recapture lost interest by increasing the site's focus on games and music, as well as keeping an eye out for new technologies that would directly benefit their users.
"[News Corp.'s Jonathan Miller] said he is 'obsessed' with real-time technology, such as the one Twitter has exploited in its social networking and microblogging service, and he wants to see MySpace incorporate it. He also said MySpace is lagging by having a platform that has been 'too closed' to external developers, something that he wants to see changed, especially for the sake of MySpace's gaming offerings. In addition, he wants to see MySpace push ahead in mobile."
Myspace makes my eyes bleed, I'm old, get off my lawn, etc, I don't participate in facebook, I think twitter is largely inane and stupid, it's an internet distribution list for stupid OMFG LOOK AT THIS LOL! posts from idiots... However, Twitter and Facebook, while I find them inane and largely irrelevant to my aged lifestyle do not make my eyes bleed, my head explode and my browser crash, as I'm assuming myspace would, if I'd ever look at it with IE, or with javascript turned on etc... blech...
I worked for America Online when Jonathan Miller came on as CEO. It was pretty encouraging to have someone who seemed clueful about the internet making decisions for a change. There was a big push to get the company thinking in terms of Web 2.0. During one of the company all-hands in 2006 or 2007 or so he even brought in Tim O'Reilly for an interview. For a company whose culture was just getting around to realizing that the AOL dial-up client was a dead-end product, this was a big change. Eventually Jonathan Miller was pushed out from AOL and a former NBC executive was brought in, and the company went back to trying to understand the internet in terms of television.
As it was with AOL, I suspect MySpace's reawakening is too late. There isn't any likelihood MySpace is going to challenge Facebook or Twitter, but there may still be some value left. MySpace was popular among kids at one point, maybe they can make something of that. Based on what I saw at AOL, Miller has good a chance of salvaging MySpace as anyone. The biggest danger that I can see is that the company is ultimately owned by Rupert Murdoch who isn't exactly a friend to progress.
KTHXBYE