Is MySpace Becoming Irrelevant?

Is MySpace Over? That is the question asked by Ashley Phillips in her article at ABCNews.

I will be honest. I do have a MySpace account but I never even attempted to find out if my friends were on MySpace. I opened an account to find out what MySpace was all about and if it could indeed help some of my clients get more exposure online. I currently use it to perform tests and research for this blog. As a web designer, I always felt MySpace was a usability professional’s nightmare. I understand that it offers the flexibility of customizing your profile but wouldn’t you agree that most people do a terrible job at it? That being said, MySpace is doing something right because it still has “twice the traffic and more users than its biggest competitor, Facebook” ¹ And that is definitely good news for small businesses, professionals or musicians seeking more visibility.

But Phillips seems to think that MySpace just doesn’t have the cachet that Facebook has. She reports that others seem to agree:

“Facebook is the company to watch, while MySpace is falling off the radar,” Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle told ABCNEWS.com. “MySpace is increasingly irrelevant. Unless they change that, they’ll go the way of Netscape or Friendster or any number of other Web properties.” ²

She then quotes blogger Simon Owens:

MySpace is inefficient and clogged with corporations, technical inefficiencies and spam. “MySpace is designed for the ’90s. It doesn’t listen to its users. It’s very inefficient and very glitchy and sacrifices usability for page views,” he said. “Facebook is very, very efficient.” ³

The 90s! Ouch! But Phillips reminds us Facebook is not squeaky clean either. Indeed, there is such a thing as an anti-Facebook movement and you also may have heard of the Facebook Beacon controversy, among others.

Through interviews with industry specialists, Phillips’s article also explores MySpace’s options to fight back as well as the impact that the initial target audiences, the creators and owners of both social network sites may have had on their current performance.

So who’s going to win the battle? According to experts, the winner will be whichever site (a new player, maybe) that takes “it to the next level when it comes to mobile applications and connectivity to other social networks”⁴ .

What do you think?

REFERENCES

1. 1. Phillips, Ashley. Is MySpace Over?, abcNEWS, Feb 1 2008, Retrieved on Feb 1 2008.
2. 2. Ibid.
3. 3. Ibid.
4. 4. Ibid.