My how the mighty have fallen! The once ubiquitous social networking site MySpace.com is well on the way to becoming the next Friendster.com. Who’s Friendster.com you ask? Exactly. The above graph compares the three social networking sites. The little green line at the bottom is Friendster. Barely a blip on the radar. But four years ago Friendster was the next big thing. Late Night TV had regular Friendster jokes. People were reconnecting after years of being out of touch. Everything was going great then MySpace came along.
MySpace wasn’t really any better than Friendster, in fact it was, and is, much worse! But it had some advantages.
First, it was built by web and email marketers (translation- spammers), so they knew some stuff about getting traffic. In fact MySpace was started by email spammers, eUniverse, as a way to get around spam filters, gather demographic information and find a new marketing venue for their clients. They made up a bogus story about “Tom” and the rest is history. Informative article on MySpace.
Secondly, it had band profiles that allowed bands to easily upload, for free, music that could be streamed by anyone, anywhere. Bands loved this (I was one of them, signing on in 2004 before the site really took off). They invited all their “fans” (translation- friends and family) to “friend” them so they could announce shows, etc. So bands flocked to MySpace leaving GarageBand.com and other sites in the dust. Soon almost every band had a profile on MySpace and their friends were milling about finding other stuff to occupy their time. Friendster really dropped the ball on this opportunity and I think only added this functionality way after the traffic shift had happened.
Third, MySpace didn’t care what you did to your profile. You could embed videos, change the look (leading to a cottage industry of people who would charge to “pimp” your profile) and pretty much do whatever you wanted. You could set up business profiles. Run scripts to “friend” everyone in the world. Create false personas (leading to a glut of questionable folks signing up and the subsequent backlash). The site was very much a wild west for the first few years.
So MySpace rolled along, got bought by Rupert Murdoch, continued to grow and generally rested on their laurels while striking up ad deals and other stuff that was more about money than about people.
Then it happened, in the course of only a few months MySpace jumped the virtual shark. Everyone was friends with everyone (translation- friends with no-one), spammers had started to exploit the site and half the messages were from spam bots, child molesters found a perfect forum to pursue their evil deeds, scams were everywhere, account hijacking was out of control and the site had more “unexpected errors”, slow servers and downtime than any other site on the web, ever. It was a complete mess.
Along comes Facebook, the night in shiny blue armor! Here’s a platform that doesn’t let you mess up your home page, discourages businesses from joining, closely polices activity, has almost no downtime, is easy to use and just feels right.
Thus begins the great MySpace migration. Just as others had made the harrowing trek from Friendster to MySpace, they now packed up and headed to Facebook. They were in search of the ever allusive meaningful conversation. They had it, briefly, at Friendster and MySpace, but now saw Facebook as the last great hope. The next best last stop on the social networking road. “Just give me a place to hang out with my friends, leave me alone and don’t let the freaks and spammers in” was the battle cry. Facebook got it so they got the traffic. So far they are keeping it and growing, but it won’t be easy.
Now the challenge for Facebook is to maintain the environment where a meaningful conversation can continue to happen between the members BUT also find a way to sell ads AND compete against upstarts like Twitter and Ning that are increasing threats to their membership base and in particular, their member’s time on site. They are still nowhere near Facebook in traffic but if we have learned anything from the recent social networking wars is to not discount an upstart.
My advice to Facebook is the remember the lessons of MySpace and Friendster. Yes, functionality is important and Yes, you need to make money at some point. But don’t forget that people are there because they find and take meaning from the experience. That is your golden goose, don’t poke and choke it in an attempt to keep up or get paid. If your growth slows, don’t panic, go to your members and have an honest conversation on ways to improve the platform. If you listen to what they want and put the better ideas in action they feel they have ownership and that will propel your continued success.
