It's too late for Myspace | Hacker News Reader

It's too late for Myspace

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28 pointsfredoliveira18 comments

I disagree. It may be too late for Myspace to be Facebook, but any business with an audience, no matter what size, has potential. Many struggling businesses would kill to have a fraction of Myspace's brand awareness; to make a left turn and have someone care.

Instead of losing hair wondering why people are leaving in droves, they should reverse their attitude and kick people out.

They should go very narrow, maybe create a premium service priced to almost insult people, and and play up the privacy angle.

Or, be what Facebook was and probably should have stayed; an easy to use student-only network.

It depends on your audience. I agree with your point that they should reinvent themselves (I explicitly say those words in the article), but I don't agree that any business with an audience has potential.

Lets put it this way, actually using your example: If they do reinvent themselves as a student-only network, they effectively have no audience, because as you know, those folks are on Facebook. If they create a premium service and play the privacy angle, they'll be trashing 99% of their functionality today, and also alienating their audience.

Things are definitely not that easy as "having audience" -> "being successful". Not in this case anyway.

Potential for what though? MySpace was purchased for $580mil, expectations were high.

Who wants to turn MySpace into a little $10mil niche product? Certainly not Murdoch. And anyone with that ambition probably would rather start from scratch that associate themselves with a failed brand. It's all psychological.

Well put. I wasn't taking the half billion in acquisition cost into consideration. However, I think with their still-huge current audience, a couple of cool-by-association acquisitions(pandora,indeed) and celebrity spokespeople, it stands in a very good place.

As a competitor to Facebook, they're sinking. But if social networking in this capacity turns, taking their medicine now for poor-sighted assumptions could make a so-so company poised to look smart in hindsight, should they right the ship.

I agree, there are major disadvantages to having this kind of link to old industry money too(being slow, hackneyed CEO culture, etc.) But, Murdoch is wily and buys talent.

I wouldn't bet against them; if for nothing else, their vehement protection of pride.

> Murdoch is wily and buys talent.

Eh, Myspace was an eyeballs acquisition, not a talent acquisition. Myspace's lack of a proper engineering culture contributed to its fall from grace; Facebook's faster load times, quicker feature additions, and app platform play all stem from a better engineering culture, and helped it overtake Myspace.

That's actually one of Myspace's biggest problems: they have a history of shoddy engineering and architecture, so they can't attract top talent.

It's not too late for Myspace - it's just too late for Myspace to be Facebook or Google.

They still have strong brand equity that they can use to generate an extremely profitable website, but what they require is a fortitude and humility to make a hard pivot, fire tons of people, and shrink dramatically.

They can't operate at scale any longer, but they do have the opportunity to leverage what still amounts to one of the top 10 brand names on the internet and use it to create something that makes a select few rich - and more importantly, actually creates value for others.

It didn't help that most customized profiles ate more CPU than running Quake. MySpace users discovered the worst CSS practices, or was it the "get MySpace codes" sites?

MySpace's own layout is heinous. Tables in tables in tables in useless tables.... the site is completely insane.

I think myspace is still a viable place for a musician to set up an online presence.

Unfortunately, I have to disagree (and time and numbers are proving me right). Once I had the idea of scraping visitor numbers for major musicians every day in order to trace how their profile views were affected by the rise of Twitter and Facebook, but never did. It is, however, quite visible.

If you're a musician, Myspace simply doesn't give you the tools to provide your audience updates the way they want to consume them. Their twitter-like stream is limited to the internal homepage that you can see while logged in, which doesn't make sense. People want real-time and Myspace doesn't give them that.

MySpace's strong area is still in bands and artists. Myspace should have freemium CMS tools so that these artists can have their own domain with interactivity similar to the way Ning encourages you to roll-you-own social network.

Facebook's got a My Band app, works just as well and Facebook has a much better feature for promoting the page to personal friends.

It is, but I can't imagine it's growing compared to the competition.

What Facebook has done to Myspace's social networking user base, Last.fm is well on its way to doing to Myspace's musician base. It's the same pattern, countering Myspace's rustic offering with vastly superior user experience and more ambitious functionality.

Anecdotally, I haven't logged into the Myspace account for my music project in at least 18 months. All the action's on Last.fm.

A lot of musicians are moving to facebook and soundcloud

My tattoo artist told me that MySpace was the place to be for that industry. This was kind of interesting as I could see the appeal, but I wonder if that will fade as well as it seems to be for musicians..

I would say it'll fade too. The audience for tattoo artists overlaps with the audience for musicians (or anything else, really) which is quickly fading. Once a few tattoo artists start moving over to other forms of personal/brand promotion, your tattoo artist friend will probably move too.

It is too late for Myspace to be the epicenter of the social networking movement, but Myspace can make a lot of money if it becomes a dating site.

I think recent prior executives feel the same way. They seem to be leaving in droves.

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