Very quickly – and some would say very sadly – former social networking giant MySpace has crumbled into the veritable joke of the online social world it once dominated.
Having been purchased in 2006 by Newscorp for a hefty price of $580 million, the once-supreme ruler of social networking will be lucky to sell for $30 million, according to some industry estimates.
Although it is unclear if – or how – MySpace can ever regain its lost luster, what’s much easier to determine, says former Facebook President and Napster co-founder Sean Parker, is why MySpace fell from its once lofty perch atop the digital social kingdom.
“The failure to execute product development,” Parker says is among the chief reasons for MySpace’s demise. “They weren’t successful in treating and evolving the product enough, it was basically this junk heap of bad design that persisted for many many years. There was a period of time where if they had just copied Facebook rapidly, they would have been Facebook. They were giant, the network effects, the scale effects were enormous.”
Parker goes on to credit the ingenious move of targeting college kids for Facebook’s eventually market dominance, “Facebook entered the market through college and the reason we went in through college was that college kids were generally not Myspace users. College kids were generally not Friendster users …”
According to TechCrunch, which covered Parker’s interview with Jimmy Fallon at the NExTWORK Conference in New York, no can definitively count out MySpace just yet.
“It’s never the end game. Facebook is now a platform upon which all kinds of applications are being built it’s definitely not it,” Parker says. “It would be incredibly presumptuous and self-serving of me to believe that Facebook was the end of history. The only way it could possibly be the end of history is if it becomes some sort of artificial super intelligence that takes over the world.”
