The Death of MySpace...

For those who have been into social networking sites such as Facebook, Friendster, Bebo, and the many many others that are out there, for some time, you've def seen an evolution of sites and a Changing of the Guard more than once of who was king of the hill. As has happened to others, it seems that MySpace has slipped off its throne after resting on its laurels for a long time.

Prior to MySpace, it seemed that Friendster was really the belle of the ball. It was what it was in social networking. MySpace began growing in popularity and its growth was unbelievable. There finally came a point around 2005 when "everybody" had a MySpace page. You could find just about anyone you knew on there and people would look up new friends/dates/acquaintences as well as old ones on MySpace to see what they could find out about them. People were using the site to not only find their friends, but to hook up with old friends, date, and even stalk people. It was big enough, popular enough, and seemingly financially viable enough that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp purchased MySpace for nearly $600 million!

MySpace, while exceptionally popular, has often been looked at as sort of not serious enough and often too "kiddie". This has been where other social networking sites have filled the gaps. There is LinkedIn, which is much more business-related. LinkedIn is more career-based and serious and people will list their employment history, gather job references, and basically network with other career-minded people to hopefully network into better jobs and stay connected with good work references. Facebook originally only connected University and College students, then high schools, and later became public. It has also been looked at as a more serious version of MySpace, despite the "pokes" and applications that have been so frequent add-options for people's pages. Other sites such as these have really drawn a lot of people who may have been introduced to social networking via MySpace into abandoning that site.

It was probably about the middle of last year, 2008, that Facebok apparently seemed to overtake MySpace as the top-tier social networking site. The buzz was all about Facebook and MySpace was fast becoming yesterday's news. Facebook seemed to be picking up more and more people and I was able to watch as so many people I knew were coming over to opening up a Facebook account by Autumn of last year. MySpace had already been taking actions to compete with Facebook, such as adding apps, a big thing for Facebook, and also adding the status option (where people can update their status and add a "mood" that displays on their page), which was a big part of Facebook. It didn't seem to be enough. Around late Autumn or early Winter 2008, MySpace seemed to be done. The activity, in comparison to Facebook had fallen to the wayside so much that it was like a ghost town. Now, Facebook is still atop the stack, while many other specialised sites are attracting their own "customers". MySpace is going to have to figure out what needs to be changed with their formula to keep their users and attract new ones. People still seem to be on the site, but many more seem to just be there to be there, while being far more active on other sites. We'll have to wait and see if Facebook can remain in its place or if MySpace or another site might step up to fill that role in the future...