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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...
MySpace is the Detroit of social networking...once vibrant and full of life, it's not a much smaller and more depressing version of its former self. Adding things that are already widely available all over the Internet isn't going to change anything.
News Corp. wildly overspent for a turkey when they bought MySpace because, as has been proven over and over again by Mr. Murdoch himself, they have no understanding at all of how the Internet works, they have no idea what it takes to make money on the Internet, and they have no idea what anything on the Internet is actually worth.
...after dial-up began to become irrelevant. "Hey, look! Bells AND whistles! You don't want that nasty DSL stuff...it sounds like a STD!" Same thing.
if the page still takes a minute to load, and when it does, it's as ugly as home-made sin.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
one of the biggest gripes I have with MySpace aside from the spam and difficulties in managing (or lack thereof) messages is the inability to keep myself logged in like Facebook and Twitter.
90% of my friends have migrated away from myspace...
90% of my friends were never "on" MySpace.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Yes, make it like Facebook, put applications in it whose main purpose is to data mine, while using a game-like interface to make the people who use it happy while they freely give out theirs and their friends' information. Yes, it is true. On Facebook, even if you don't use an application, if you don't specifically say don't use my information, your friends using the application will enable your information to be used.
Personally, I think the whole mini-application craze the web is going through is getting old. I do have Facebook, and I am so sick and tired of everyone wanting me to install an 'app' so they can level up or whatever. No, I will not give my information up so that you can get another fucking flower in your garden. I will not give my identity to a faceless corporation so that your mafia gang will get more powerful. I will not let some company use my life to earn more money for themselves just so I can see the results for some compatibility test you took and thought everyone on your friends list should take, just so you can see how compatible your are with all your friends. Guess what, if they are actually your friends, you already should have a basic understanding of your compatibility(true compatibility, not which cartoon character are you compatibility) with them.
I don't want to enhance my sex life, nor am I looking for hot singles on the web in my area. I don't need viagra, and I don't have wrinkles that need hiding. I will not change my status every time I eat a meal, and I will not put pictures of what I wore today. I will not comply with this state of mind that says I have to be open with my life, that I must post everything I do to my Twitter account(which I refuse to make) and that I must make blog posts about Britney Spears and my dog. If I want someone to know what I am doing, and I feel they will care, I will call them or meet them in person and carry on a conversation with them until we each feel that what we have to say is finished. I will not live my life through Facebook.
Stay out of my life, Mark Zuckerberg. May you lose your billions as quickly as you made them.
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.
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
Frankly, I never understood why MySpace got anywhere at all. I've yet to see a single page on it where I don't think about slapping the author with a lawsuit for emotional damages.
It is but-ugly, unfriendly and loud (both visually and with all the crappy background music). In short, it's the hip-hop of the web. Uh wait. I think I just answered my question.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
In my humble opinion, MySpace is just too painful to be true:
1) it tells me to install Flash, while I have it installed and working fine on other sites (using even proprietary Flash 10 on my Debian amd64 box)
2) it doesn't have a single way to give feedback to the administrators of MySpace (e.g. for issue 1)
3) it's a pain to the eyes to see most MySpace pages. Things are messed up, bad color schemes, hardly any well-thought about layout.
Who needs MySpace?
Unfortunately, many music composers seem to like it... :(