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I know Facebook happened but is there more to it than that?
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In hindsight, MySpace's initial dominance in the social media space seems to have been a "first mover advantage". They were the first to tap into social media in a way that captured the attention of a critical mass of people. Social media was still a very new world though - an undeveloped market - and what MySpace offered was a niche in the context of what social media has become.
Picture present day social media as a big pie, of which MySpace is a little sliver. Most of the pie hadn't been made when Myspace came around, so everyone jumped on board, but as social media has become bigger broader, MySpace basically stayed the same.
Facebook put pictures, messaging and social planning at it's core, and those features appeal to a broader base of people than the MySpace core that includes site ("space") design and music sharing. Subsequently, many of the people that joined MySpace because "OMG, social media" found that newer social media sites (mostly Facebook) actually suited their needs better.
I would add that Myspace had largely corrupted itself before the social scene took off. Myspace was covered in apps, weird custom pages, etc... and looked dirty. Facebook looked outstandingly web 2.0 and clean in comparison. Facebook also opened initially to the perfect audience, college students and opened school by school so the hype factor there was huge. Now Facebook has largely met Myspace in terms of crapola apps, etc... but they have cornered the social market so well it doesn't appear to do any harm.
That's a good point. Combining your comment and mine, and simmering down to ELI5:
MySpace discovered a big new market. Facebook and Twitter, among others, gave the market what it wanted.
Facebook did a much better job of connecting it's users together in a more social way. Myspace was all about your own fancy page and the abilit to interact with your friends and see what they were doing, was rudimentary compared to what facebook offered.
People preferred the social aspect of facebook more than the custom design aspect of MySpace.
It also didn't hurt that it was rather exclusive at first and being able to be apart of it was a feeling akin to being invited to a special club.
Myspace became a giant advertisement hub. The site is basically the MTV of social networks. Now profiles setup for movies can friend request you. Go pull the page up right now. The site looks like an pop-culture blog. It has top-10 lists, celebrity gossip, popular actors and music artists ect...
what about friendster? weren't they pre-myspace?
Friendster made the mistake of approaching a market too early with a product too avant-garde. Social networking as a website genre is a really radical concept, especially since the internet before it was semi-anonymous usernames and disconnected, rapid-fire interaction with people (chatrooms, forums, BBS boards). Essentially Friendster released an iPhone in 1994- we might have been okay with mobile phones as consumers but the leap up to smartphone would be too much when people are just getting used to talking anywhere.
Yes, Friendster started a couple years before MySpace.
Well put.
Except for the 'an pop-culture' part.
This is the answer I needed. Explains it like I could be a five year old. Thanks.
Yup, coupled with the fact that anyone could easily--and generally did--make fake accounts...facebook started with just some colleges, so you had to be someone to get into it
There's still a big focus on this, and I think it's an important part of their long-term success compared to MySpace. Instead of representing yourself as a semi-fictional internet character, you're representing yourself as yourself. You're talking to your real-life friends, inviting each other to events, tagging each other. It's very masturbatory, but in a good way.
masturbation is always good
I agree, but since 9/11 they frown upon it in airplanes.
There's a bad way to be masturbatory?
Yes, Christina Aguilera's singing is a good example.
That, and that people's pages had music on them, which was startling at times, and if you didn't like the song, too bad. About the fake accounts, I was friends with a bottle of ketchup and with Sam Crenshaw from Today's Special. And Gordon Shumway aka Alf.
Don't forget autoplaying Youtube videos. Sometimes multiple ones at once.
I had a myspace dedicated to me eating things.
I had a Myra Hindley MySpace account. It was friends with various other serial killer accounts, and also my then-girlfriend. I'm not proud.
Yup someone with more than a middle school education too.
Oh I wish this was still true!
don't we all
You cannot imagine the number of pre-pubescent cousins I've had who have friended me on Facebook. I mean, when I was their age, I was playing outside and taking care of Neopets, not social networking.
Neopets!? When I was their age I was playing in caves and trembling in fear of thunder.
I miss pre-cash shop Neopets
Networking has gotten me a lot further than pokemon and hide and seek ever did. If they learn people skills young, not just schoolboy interaction but how to manage a persona and interact with diverse groups of people, that's going to be much more useful.
about 10% of Facebook accounts are fake...
Not in the beginning. It didn't even open up to everyone until about 6 years or so ago. You had to have a university email address.
Oh, the good ol' days...
Yeah, I remember I to had to have a valid college email to join FB.
Even though they're loading down Facebook pages with forced crap, they've still got a long way to go before they begin to approach the visual disaster that was most MySpace pages.
MySpace was like going back to the late 90's and viewing random people's geocities pages. Appearance isn't everything, but some of those designs bordered on assault.
It's interesting that Myspace got annoying with poorly designed profiles and visual crap, but Facebook is keeping the profiles clean and hammering us with status and informational updates that we just don't care about. "Friend X liked just gonna sit here like I don't give a fuck and laugh's picture" is the most annoying thing about that site, and it's only going to get worse. I wonder if it's going to hit a critical point of annoyances that drives people away.
I hope so, then we can find something else that will be way better, so we can do it all over again.
Indeed. Myspace was very much a product of the times. Geocities anyone?
I geocitied. I was about 13 and a huge rasslin' fan. So I had gifs all over the page, random picutes, and a guestbook that was filled with words a 13 your old shouldn't be called.
I still cringe...
I would argue that even though facebook has lots of shitty apps, it still manages to have a uniform look and feel. Some of the MySpace pages though? Good god, it's like comic sans had an illegitimate love child with an animated blood bar
Don't forget the auto playing music! That place truly was a hell hole.
Oh, I think the harm is simply yet to have been done...
I remember when FB started spreading around campus. Basically when you would ask "what's facebook?" people would say, "It's myspace for college students and it doesn't look all shitty."
What is Web 2.0?
Marketing term. Websites that contrasted with the "early days" of the Web, with a focus on social interaction, rounded, clean designs in white and pastel, and emphasis on user-generated content. Compare to the average Geocities page, with an abundance of hard lines and right angles, .gifs of preexisting material, and horribly clashing neon colors.
So the spacejam website is Web 1.0?
also those crapola apps don't look as bad on faceboook as they do on myspace
I would also add the folks at the top enjoyed too much nose candy
To call them "first mover" is somewhat true, but sixdegrees.com was there in 1997: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com and then Friendster after that.
MySpace only hooked me due to the local music scene in Los Angeles being deeply mixed in with it. The whole time, from start to finish, it seemed like a really bad website by any design standards. It was just that the people on the service reached, as you said "critical mass."
I wasn't sure when Friendster first appeared. I think MySpace was the first mover in terms of really accessing the market, even if it wasn't technically the first. Maybe a parallel is Apple with the iPad? It's basically seen as creating/accessing a big new market for tablets, but it's also true that there were other tablets before it that failed.
I used to live in a six degrees chat, thanks for the memory.
I thought I was the only person to remember Six Degrees. Thank you. XD
You can't forget Tila Tequila! She was the first to have over 1 million friends and she brought many, many people to the site.
Also, shortly after MySpace was purchased by Fox the front page was regularly covered in ads. It actually looks better today than when I (and most everybody else) left the site for dead.
That probably sped the site's demise. I wonder what their thinking was, a few things cross my mind:
Trying to monetize to soothe investors / attract a buyer
Trying to exploit what they though was a captive user base
Incompetence
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Explains the Incompetence part.
Fox bought MySpace for $580 million dollars. I bet Tom is happy about the money he got.
He's on google+ and he's pretty happy from what I can tell
hasn't aged a day
I want to add that for a while many people stayed on MySpace because they liked it for what it was. As facebook started becoming more and more popular, MySpace tried to copy all their features, but with a very poor design. And most members like myself who used to like it more than facebook ended up thinking "I don't need another facebook, I guess I'll delete this one".
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First mover advantage sums it up entirely. They more or less created the market. They were the first site where you could put up your picture and a little personal information for free, and talk to your friends. Problem is that they didn't do it very well. The commenting system was awkward at best, letting people have a little customizability was awesome but I think giving people full customization of their profile was pretty dumb. Facebook came along and made a more uniform and mature experience (let's face it, no one cared about the first six seconds of your My Chemical Romance song) and eventually dominated the market. The sleek, simple, Web2.0 feel was enough to drag people away from the relatively sloppy and therefor awkward to use Myspace.
Also the reason that it was able to do so well at first was because so many people joined, got their friends to join, etc...
When lots of people started moving to Facebook the same process happened, but instead of a mass migration to Myspace it was a mass exodus. People don't want to use Myspace if their friends don't and so they also leave. It is a cycle.
Exactly. You know how Facebook always changes those profile layouts and people get angry? Well, the truth is that this is what made Facebook so influential. To summarize, Facebook changed and adapted while MySpace did not.
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Corporations milked it for all it was worth.
Messaging? ha! Well definitely not chat. That shit never worked at all. Only when they unified the message system and the chat system (which of course saves everything forever) did anything work properly. It was unforgivable that a company with that much market share and position in the tech market could not get chat to work right for years.
My statement is offtopic, but I love bringing it up...Classmates.com would have completely dominated social networking if they had made the service free instead of paid
Remember those ads? They had the entire internet wallpapered with their ads. All they had to do was make it free and go with the targeted advertising model like facebook and google
I remember my senior year of HS (in 2001), they made all of us sign up for Classmates.com accounts so that they would be able to get in touch with all of us for the reunions 10-20 years later.
11 years later, I'm not even sure Classmates.com is even still a thing.
I believe it might be a thing with my 57 year old dad. But he tends to be technologically about a decade behind, bless him.
It's true, he's still rockin' Netscape Navigator. Hardcore.
Netscape navigator. Lol. Haven't thought about that in years.
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My step-dad still uses it.
My 10-year high school reunion has just been organized almost entirely through Facebook. Suck it, Classmates..com
The Russian version of Classmates.com (odnoklassniki.ru) is huge.
It's still there. Go to any of the newspaper websites for the parent company of Reddit and you will find annoying popups for classmates.com and Netflix.
Classmates.com employees don't have the heart to tell CEO about Facebook.
I thought that sounded like the onion.
Everyone was tired of hearing their friends horrible songs autoplaying when they visit their pages.
Yeah just awful. I wish people who still have ringback tones would realize how much it makes me just want to hang up and never call them again.
My parents called someone the other day who had a ringback. They were so confused. I had to do more than enough convincing to make them stay on the line and wait until someone answered.
TIL about ringback tones. Should I consider myself lucky to have never experienced one?
Yes. Unless you like to hear a random 20 second segment of some song you are totally not in the mood for.
Then the person probably wonders why people are pissed off every time they pick up.
How young are you that you don't know what that is? And here I thought I was a kid...
Sometimes I don't want them to answer so quick because I am singing!
Just like Geocities or Homestead.
While it remained a critical feature for loyalists of MySpace, the idea that every dickhead was turning their page into the design equivalent of a web site from 1997 (complete with sparkly gifs and terrible backgrounds) sent people to the much cleaner, more refined Facebook. In conjunction with a lagging feature set (the Status/Newsfeed features that people couldn't possibly imagine a social network being without didn't arrive on MySpace until it was too late) these were nails in the coffin for a company that had been acquired for far more than it was worth.
posting bulletins was so cool though, brah.
Oh my god, the surveys. So many hours lost telling people which movies I've seen -___-
For one, I think Myspace actually got people familiar with the web...I actually got exposed to HTML, scripts and basic web stuff because of myspace; I sometimes spent hours looking up ways to get something new/cool to show up on my page without fucking everything else up. The option to customize everything on your profile allowed people to truly build unique pages and express themselves -- as unique individuals.
Nowadays people have adopted a 'me-too' mentality, opting to have a static, one size fits all page (on FB) rather than building something truly unique...sure it's easier to navigate through but does it truly sum you up?
Forcing users to adopt the TimeLine is FaceBooks way of 'making up for this', but it's also a ploy to keep users constantly on the site...
You're right, it's the one and only thing I miss about myspace. The "space" part. It really helped me learn and hone my HTML/CSS skills and I was rockin' some kick ass layouts back in the day.
sigh
Relevant The Show with Ze Frank
This made me do a google search on him bringing me to his new show, a show which I had no idea about until now.
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Haha - except Facebook never got acquired, they simply went public ;)