Remember MySpace? They’re Finally Making Some Changes
Remember when the social media war wasn’t just between Facebook and Twitter, with Google nipping at both their heels with weird and mostly ineffectual efforts? Us neither. But apparently a long time ago there was this thing called ‘MySpace’ that a couple of people used. It was ugly, and never worked particularly well, and allowed people to do awful things like have music play when you visit their profile. MySpace found some success among musicians looking to throw together a simple fan site to upload music to, but socially they couldn’t compete with Facebook. Now they’re fighting back. MySpace is leveraging their one ace in the hole and pushing profiles to the limit, an area Facebook has been as yet unable to fully dominate. Sean Percival, MySpace exec posted to Twitter that he had a “clean new profile” and linked to his MySpace page, surprisingly clean and cool-looking. Since Google’s efforts at toppling Facebook have been mostly weird and ineffective, and Diaspora is still ramping up, we need someone to step in and take on the privacy-stomping beast. Could it really be MySpace though?
What changes, exactly? I thought this article would list some of the things MySpace has done to improve itself, but cleaning up profiles doesn’t go under “changes.”
I have said before, and still say, that MySpace should focus completely on music and make its niche there. Forget trying to be like Facebook, just like Facebook should forget trying to be like Twitter. Each of these social media sites should try to do their own thing. I give Twitter lots of props for paving their own way.