Slashdot Mirror
MySpace Loses Ten Million Users In One Month
Goldiloxx writes "Social networking website MySpace lost over ten million users between January and February 2011, according to comScore. In February 2011, the Internet website had less than 63 million users, down from a previous total of approximately 73 million."
MySpace has no change in surviving anymore. Facebook has 600+ million users and Windows Live Messenger has 330+ million users. The only larger network than those two is interestingly Chinese QQ, which has 636 million users.
I'm surprised it's not more. Facebook is at or near its apex, and will soon experience the same downward slippage. Twitter should have IPOâ(TM)d long ago, they missed the money boat.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
People must be getting richer and finding jobs since MySpace is for the economically disadvantaged while Facebook is primarily used by the fiscal elite.
MySpace's Chief Executive Officer Michael Jones has claimed that the website is "no longer a social network anymore" and that it is currently a "social entertainment destination".
Allow me to translate: "Our business model is screwed, because someone else did it much better, so we're desperately trying to rebrand ourself as something else"
It's in people's nature to never give up, keep trying to the bitter end, but this is a sinking ship that cannot be saved.
I doubt they actually lost 10 million users, probably just a few thousand 50-year-old men *pretending* to be 10 million teenage girls.
You're right, Facebook is definitely on the decline. They've only added 100 million users in the last year.
Your anecdotal evidence about friends who have abandoned it is kind of irrelevant in the face of facts that show Facebook is clearly growing. Like it or not, you can't dislike it into non-existence.
Thank goodness he bet on the wrong social network. If you think Facebook is evil now, imagine that tyrant at the wheel...
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
i knew I forgot something....
bah.
I didn't know the FBI's Pedophile Hunting Team was doing such a great job! 10 million accounts closed in a month?
oh, you mean there are other people who still use(d) MySpace? #newsToMe
so printing my myspace address on the back of a CD like I did 3 years ago was a bad idea?
crap
www.myspace.com/russbro - say hello to www.facebook.com/russbrownmusic
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
Huh. I only started using it little more than a year ago. If they shut it off I wouldn't really care, but I have a lot of friends who would.
I did have the misfortune of looking at a few myspace pages, though (never had an account), and they made me want to rip my eyes out. My brother was actually boasting about having his own website and, when I asked what the address was, gave me a link to his myspace page. So... I guess what I'm saying is I don't see how facebook has become worse...
Stupid sexy Flanders.
anyone remember friendster?
it's my belief that social networks will rise and fall, endlessly in succession. simply because ubiquity eventually becomes a liability amongst a crowd who views exclusion and superiority to be more important. eventually, one of these smaller exclusive networks becomes the object of envy for others to be "in" that exclusive group, and the long march to ubiquity begins, until you start all over again
its an empty vapid game. its also pretty much boilerplate sociological fact. consider nightclubs in cities: the small chic "in" club that everyone wants to get into, overexposure, then decline because the "cool" kids want their own exclusive club. rinse, repeat
and no, facebook will not become ubiquitous plumbing. because they need to make money to survive. to make that money, they need to sell the personal details of their members. which is a force that will drive people from facebook as they wise up to how creepy that really is: by feeding their personal details to the machine, they are telling their abuser how to abuse them
so be on the lookout for the next friendster/ myspace/ facebook. could be diaspora. or maybe being programmed right now in some dorm room. $$$ to the chaps who start/ find the right network at the right time, and ride that rocket all the way up
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And 62.9 Million of them are pornobots and promotional pages for crappy bands.
As if it could get any worse, now their name has underscores in it.
Heh. When I was on Myspace, the first thing I did was defriend him.
I run Ubuntu skinned to look like a Mac on a PC. Go figure.
The next and 'final' social network will be an open source peer-to-peer network with commercial caching and hosting; if my plan works.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
So, where are they? Abducted by aliens? Can Mulder and Scully look into this? Spontaneous human combustion? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_human_combustion ? Maybe they are on a small island in the Pacific, playing Pinochle ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinochle ) with Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison?
Question: "How do you lose ten million users? " Answer: "One customer at a time."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
But my life coach said if I think hard enough it'll come true!
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
Does that include users who have abandoned the service?
I have a myspace account. I don't think I've updated it in 5 years.
Awesome news. I wish it had more to do with people actively looking at boycotting News Corp.
I've been working on a firefox extension to help people boycott News Corp, NBC and others: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/webcott/
Also looking at alternatives to myspace here: http://bryanquigley.com/webcott/leave-myspace-for-wordpress-com
Now that's what I call a good start! just 63 million to go!
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
You were actually able to view a MySpace page for long enough to want to rip your eyes out? I'm impressed. Back when MySpace was popular, most of those pages would crash my web browser long before I actually got to look at them.
Interesting coincidence that the Rustock Botnet spam network was taken down and MySpace loses 10 Million accounts? I know these two events can't be connected to each other, right?
You know. That thing. With the things.
Considering their new beta plan screwed up a lot of sites for bands, I think the migration numbers are not only right, but also will increase as more bands move to other social media platforms. The only reason I even think to go to Myspace is because some band has made it their landing page. If Myspace continues to be hostile to the only group that keeps it alive, they will have no choice but to go away.
Bakersfield has no chance of surviving. New York MSA has 19 million+ residents and LA has 17 million+ residents. The only other city north of the Isthmus larger than those two is interestingly Mexico City, which has 22.8 million.
Granted that there are a lot more people who want to live in the other three. The point is, mom-n-pop stores exist despite the onslaught of the big boxes. Internet sites are probably more egalitarian.
Someone will probably pull the plug on MySpace at some point though, if only because it's an unrewarding task to downscale from corporation to personal blog. The trip up is exciting and potentially rewarding. The trip down is the domain of archivers, fans, etc. and usually the few people that want to do it can't wrest control from the corporate shell. They always want to cling on to that little last bit. They couldn't stand to see anybody make an ordinary small biz out of it, and employ just one or two people, or a small fan site hosted by a non-profit.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
...until that starts happening at Facebook.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
You may have chosen to close your account, but they still have your data.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
you're talking about a social network protocol, like http, smtp, nntp, etc
the point is, we'd have many different internets today if it was started as different walled gardens you had to pay for. well, actually, that is the way it was: bbses, compuserve, etc. all of which died in favor of the free and the open
so end game for friendster/ myspace/ facebook is a free and open social network protocol. sntp sounds too confusingly like smtp so lets call it...
vytp
vapid yammering transfer protocol
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's pretty disappointing to see a supposedly geek-friendly site get a story this badly wrong. Everybody crowing about Myspace losing 10%+ of their userbase in one month is completely missing the point. Of course, other sites that got to the story first have made the exact same mistake, but they don't have the focus on tech that this site supposedly does.
Myspace didn't lose 10 million users in a month. What we're talking about isn't people canceling accounts, what we're talking about is a reduction in the number of unique IP addresses recorded in Myspace's logs for the month. Uniques are not the same thing as users -- as any self-respecting geek should know, many of those IP addresses will be single users getting dynamic IP addresses or using multiple locations (home, work, etc.) to access their account. At the same time, many other users will be behind proxy servers, or connecting from shared (public, work, etc.) locations that make multiple users all appear to be from the same IP.
Which is all to say that this number is relatively meaningless, without detailed knowledge of the other numbers that would be reported along with it.
And it's not to say Myspace aren't dead. They've been essentially dead for several years now, to be quite honest.
Myspace used to have a fantastically simple interface.
Everything was placed in logically separate sections, everything was usually a click or 2 away.
Now? The interface is atrocious. Seriously. It looks like it was designed by some kid learning CSS for the first time.
Visual horizontal separations, hundreds of them. Huge amounts of white space.
Less important things are placed higher than personal things. (seriously, FUCK recommendations on websites. Youtube added that shit recently and it annoys me every single time i see that terrible sidebar since it takes up so much damn space. Worse is the crap keeps appearing. I need to userstyle that crap out of existence)
Way too much information as well. It's all fine and well if you hide information behind something, such as a simple "More >>" button, even tooltips, or stuff that only appears as you hover over the post item. (and this is coming from a programmer who tends to deal with a lot of information and data)
Not only that, they killed off one of the main things that made it popular: CUSTOM. PROFILES.
I'm all for base profiles that have basic information about a person being placed at the top of profiles.
But to remove the ability to do most of the stuff that people could do in the past is just awful.
To think I even helped testing filters and finding new exploits to get them patched so we could keep those custom profiles in addition to the header section, only for it to be ditched for this static crap.
It was one of the few places that could actually be called My Space. But now it is My Space As Myspace Says It Should Be.
Facebook is partly to blame as well (imitation). But at least Facebooks UI is nice to look at.
Better yet, for all you social networking sites, why not add a "My Page" that gives people near enough absolute freedom to do whatever they want in it.
A simple header at the top. Prevent it from being covered. (stupidly easy to do)
Maybe let people add gadgets on to it, drag-and-drop, resize, minimum dimensions, blah blah etc. All the usual stuff.
Done. This way, people can absolutely 100% have a profile AND a page that lets them express themselves.
Hey, I can dream, right?
Tom - "They're my friends" / Gollum - "You don't have any friends"
You have no change to survive, make your time
I was about to make the same joke, but it was "chance". (Mmm, WHAT YOU SAY !!)
Can't it just Google them?
:wq
MySpace was the GeoCities of social media sites. Every page had horrific backgrounds and thousands of animated GIFs and there was crap blinking everywhere.
I'm surprised that a good percentage of MySpace users didn't die from epileptic seizures induced by all that flashing.
That's because Facebook doesn't have a "Dislike" button.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
it's my belief that social networks will rise and fall, endlessly in succession. simply because ubiquity eventually becomes a liability amongst a crowd who views exclusion and superiority to be more important
That sounds like a fair description of Slashdot, but does it really apply to Facebook?
Just the other day I got an event invite on facebook for a "delete your account party"
The description said "hey people im deleting my facebook. you should too! you can reach me at...." he rambled off a bunch of email, IM, forum contacts and a voip. I made it a point that he shouldnt try to influence people to give up facebook just because does. I then pointed out that its counterproductive to replace x with y and z if they function exactly the same and everyone uses x anyway.
He didnt give a phone# or wanna resolve to hangout more in person, but his last contact was his myspace url. I was curious and clicked on it. Surprisingly enough it was current. It suffices to say that he didnt like what i had to say and got pissy, so i gave up.
Steve Jobs doesn't have a marketing degree. In face he doesn't have any degree at all. But he was directly involved in transitioning personal computers from a 70's garage hobby into a mainstream market. The same cannot be said for anybody else that helmed Apple (hence why apple did so poorly when only sales and marketing guys ran it).
You don't have to log into MySpace to see the bands website or even to listen to the music they post. Myspace IS a low-cost (or free) hosting provider. They also supply the tools to easily put bands pages up. Basically, what you said was "Do exactly what you are doing, but with a different company because I am too hip to see you of MySpace".
Anyone been to Friendster lately? They're trying to position themselves as a place to go for gaming.
And does anyone remember that UK site, Friends Reunited? The one where you had to pay to contact your old school friends? I still get an occasional email from them saying "latest happenings on Friends Reunited". There's nothing happening.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
There was nothing wrong with hosting a music page back in the days of Myspace's popularity. As long as it was a public page anyone could go and view content. It was simple to design for because there were applets that let you pick color schemes, add pictures and arrange content with copy/paste ease of use. The addition of the video and music players let artists host content on myspace's dime
I didn't think MySpace still had 10 million users left!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Usenet still gets spam. Figure THAT one out!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Because of this article, I logged into my myspace account. Lo and behold, there was a message waiting for me saying, "you can upgrade your profile and sync with facebook!"
When they're trying to link you to their supposed competitor, you know they're dead.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Netcraft confirms it: MySpace is dying!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It seemed like a place where teenagers posted naughty pics and hooked up.
You got a problem with that???
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
THAT's the real surprise.
Why don't they shut down the other 63 million spam pages? It would clean up my Google search results. Nobody uses it for anything else anymore, anyway.
So does that mean my inactive MySpace account from last century still counts as a "MySpace user"?
I think I changed my home email three times since then.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I met someone who worked at Myspace, they said they laying almost all their employees off this summer.
Have they tried looking behind the couch?
have they done anything worthwhile to keep their customers lately, anything new, anything.....not like facebook which is always pushing (like google) to be on top....i see myspace as the first gen floppy, to be replaced by next gen cd (facebook) until dvds come out, and usb keys...etc.... myspace in my opinion was just a first stepping stone to better things, ....twitter is the same too in my books, although charlie sheen is helping them stay on top...
If they can now just loose 63 million more, Ruppert Murdoch will get what he deserves.
Well, you can ignore it. The good thing about FB is that it is absolutely useless and a total waste of time, so you won't be missing anything when you cancel your account.
From the original article:
"Tech industry analysts comScore say figures show MySpace lost more than 10 million unique users worldwide between January and February."
But what about Friendface? Somebody _please_ think of Friendface!
proud caffeine whore
MySpace can lose 1 million users a month and it'll still last 5 years unless closed earlier. The Chinese social networking websites are just as likely to grow and grow then shrink too. I wouldn't invest in News Corp, the owner of MySpace, but if I could I would invest in the Chinese businesses. Then in a few more years I'd move to other investments.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
NPR news is pretty neutral (I'm talking about the hourly news, not the shows, which do lean to the left a bit generally)
Years ago I liked to watch Crossfire on PBS where Conservatives and (NOT) Liberals would sit across from each other debating an issue.
if you get your political opinions from people like Beck
I used to be accused of getting my beliefs and opinions from him. When I was it was the first tyme I heard of him. Though it's been more than 10 years I used to like to listen to Rush. He'd spew all these numbers that were easy to prove wrong. I don't listen to leftists either, they're just as bad.
Falcon
Notice I didn't say "Liberals" above, instead I used "leftists". That is because they are not Liberals. A real liberal believes in liberty and small government, but many of those called "liberal" today believe in big government.
Should there be a Law?
Mind you, I don't have cable TV. How closed minded is that?? ;)
Cable TV not needed for Fox News. There are over the air-waves Fox radio and TV stations.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Says my 18 year old cousin, from his college dorm room.
Once one of the largest cities in America, Detroit has no chance for surviving. In the latest tally the population is down to just 700,000. The city is finished, it really is.
From an article in today's Wall Street Journal:
"For years, Detroit was a synonym for American energy and opportunity. Here Motown Records was born and General Motors became the first company to make a billion dollars in a single year. And here the auto industry that we now think of as geriatric drove the American economy, helped create the American Dream, and defined American culture to the world."
Times change, people move on, they leave the city, website, whatever it is, because it is no longer relevant.
Since some months, after logging in successfully, my session seems to get lost and I have to login again.
So the site is quite unusable for me.
I don't have any fancy stuff installed in firefox. adblock plus, that's all.
Solution: well facebook does not have that problem, so I'll go and use that one...
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.