February 18, 2019 • 35 mins
Once it was the king of social media platforms but these days MySpace is nearly forgotten. How did the company go from being on top of the world to a punchline?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
My Space where friend zone was a good thing. Founded
in two thousand three, this social media outlet was a
leader in its arena, defining much of what we know
about social media today. But despite everyone having a mutual
friend and Tom, in two thousand eight, a bunch of
four business decisions and lack of competitive edge would make
them lose a lot of friends and followers to Facebook,
(00:29):
but my Space continued to cling on like that quiet
childhood classmate or that weird cousin you keep in touch
with just out of obligation. So let's poke around and
share the secrets of what took this social media platform
out of the friend zone and into a forgotten link.
This is my Space on the Brink. Hi, I'm Jonathan
(01:00):
Strictly and I'm Aerial Casting, and you're listening to the
Brink where we are exploring the almost forgotten website my Space.
I mean it still exists, like we said, yeah, But
I mean I think there are people who might be
listening to this podcast right now who are like, what
is what is my Space? Or I've heard of that,
but I've never seen it. So interest of full disclosure,
(01:23):
Ariel and I both at least once upon a time
had active MySpace accounts. Yes, I think I maybe added
two things to mine. I was a desperate clinger to
live journal prior to joining Facebook, but I kind of
made an almost direct link I had in my Space,
but I didn't utilize it. I used my Space quite
a bit for a while, and I clung to it
(01:45):
for a while. I actually had a MySpace profile, and
when when Facebook finally opened up and allowed old people
like me who were no longer college students to finally join,
I maintain both and MySpace and a Facebook file. But
they did fall off the brink. I would argue, like
the value of that company plummeted to a ridiculous amount.
(02:10):
When you look at how much it was valued at
its peak versus how much it was last sold for.
It was a phenomenal difference. But like we said, they
didn't completely go away, so they just fell into obscurity. Yeah,
so it's not like this is one of those stories
where you have a company that has gone into say bankruptcy,
and just sort of faded out. Even our Toys or
(02:32):
Us story, we talked about how that company seemingly was
gone for good and then now there's a an effort
to sort of resurrect the brand. My Space never quite
went to fully dead. It's only mostly dead. Yeah, So
let's talk a little bit about history before we get
into what happened. Sure. So my Space was founded in
(02:53):
two thousand three, as we said in the intro, by
Christy Wolfe and Tom Anderson. Tom Anderson being your friend
to Tom. When you get joined, everybody gets a friend
with Tom, or did. At least in the beginning, they
weren't actually a social media site. There were an e
marketing site called the Universe and they sold things like
diet pills and stuff you might google to see is
(03:15):
this actually legit? Yeah, And they were looking around at
some of the other sites that were starting to get popularity,
and we could even do an episode on this social
media platform. At some point, they were looking at a
thing that was called Friendster. Now, did you have a
friends Stair account? I did not. Friendster was one of
those things that came and went before I ever. I
(03:35):
think maybe I checked it out once or twice, but
I never made an event uh profile for it. There
are a couple of social media sites that fall into
that category. But they looked at Friendster. It was a
popular site. They saw that there was a lot of
what we would now call engagement, and they thought, we
want to see that kind of activity on what we're
(03:57):
working on. How can we do that? Yeah, Yeah, so
they've basically just copied it. So that turned out to
be a working strategy. Yeah, And it was specifically so
that they could do what is called influencer marketing. Yeah,
this is something that we're all pretty familiar with these days. It's,
you know the idea of people who get big followings
on social media and then brands will reach out to
(04:19):
them and have those people leverage their fame to market
on behalf of those brands. Yeah. So what they did
to get those influencers was they went and they recruited
all of the quote unquote hot girls that Friendster had
kicked off of their social media site to join my
Space um, as well as bands and photographers, really anybody
(04:40):
who your average Joe Schmo would want to follow and
be a internet friend of. Yeah. So essentially, the the
tried and true method of how can we attract people
to this site? Well, for guys, let's just give them
the feeling that all these extremely attractive women want to
(05:01):
be friends with. Yes, the strategy did work. However, later on,
much much later on, analysts would say that using that
strategy was sort of a predictor that my Space would
inevitably fail because they were coming at the angle of
creating a social networking platform from the wrong position, that
(05:22):
they weren't doing it as social networking first, then find
a way to monetize it. They were looking at a
way to monetize something, and they went to the social
networking site. Now, in defense of my Space, there wasn't
a whole lot of precedent for what they were doing.
I think that focusing on on the individual instead of
on the networking it's it's something that is called Read's
law actually, where they say that the success of a
(05:44):
social network is to get the people to connect with
each other and do so within groups. Yeah. If you
get the more people you can get active on your
social networking site, the more valuable the site is. So,
and it has to do with not just not really
just the number, but also the value of the connections
between the people. And as we will discover, one of
(06:07):
my spaces challenges was allowing for those meaningful connections to
have Yeah. Yeah. In two thousand four, my Space breaks
one million users, a month, and now they're getting some
bigger names to promote their site, like R. E. M.
And we're familiar with because you know those are local
boys athletes Georgia. And they made some design decisions that
(06:30):
were interesting. Yeah, I mean at face value, they seem
pretty cool. They decided to let the members guide how
to build this site, so anybody could take their profile
page and add whatever widgets, videos, backgrounds, backgrounds, articles they
wanted to special cursors. Yeah, which you know, from a
user standpoint like, this is super customizable. This is really cool,
(06:52):
but in actuality it just led to a bunch of
really messy cluttered stuff. Yeah. Eye source. With ucebook profiles,
you know, you can add things like photos. You can
change out your little cover photo at the top and
your profile picture, and if you want to, you can
do things that affect your Facebook profile but not anyone else's,
Like you could change the language like the pirate or something.
(07:15):
But my Space had it where you could actually change
the appearance of your profile, the background color. You could
put a photo up like that could be like a
tiled photo as your background cover. You could put in
various songs that were connected to MySpace, so you could
have songs playing automatically if you wanted to so as
soon as someone visited your profile, you know, Matchbox. So
(07:41):
it was definitely one of those things that I felt. One,
there was not a cohesive experience, right, you could go
to two different profiles and have two wildly different reactions
to it. And for another, it meant that a lot
of people just kind of took a kitchen sink approach
to their profiles, like any any sort of switched they
could toggle on, they were going to toggle and it
(08:03):
made it super irritating. It actually reminded me a lot
of Geo Cities, which is another company we could cover
on the brink at some point. So not the best
experience once these things were all implemented, although many of
them were introduced over time, so it wasn't like it
just instantaneously went to an ice ore. Yeah, and it
didn't have a negative effect immediately. In fact, my space
(08:24):
is doing so well that in two thousand and five
it was purchased by News Corps headed by Rupert Murdoch
for five and eighty million dollars. Yeah, that more than
half a billion dollars. Now at the time, people thought
that's a whole lot of money. Right now, in retrospect,
people have said that was way too much money. And
(08:45):
part of this was because they were in a bidding war.
Wasn't just that they were Yeah, they were actually fighting
with Viacom to buy it. So this this was something
where you had two very wealthy companies with very deep
pockets ready to go after the same property. Things didn't
go sour immediately. Again, the narrative tends to be the
(09:06):
news Core spent way too much money buying my Space
and then my Space tanked, But in reality that's not
exactly what happened. No, so news Corp bought my Space,
They're like, you guys, do your thing. Yeah, we're not
gonna micromanage. Yeah, but they're a big company, and so
with a big company comes red tape to make any changes,
(09:26):
to develop things, to resolve conflicts. And so even though
they didn't intend to interfere, they were still interfering. But
they weren't interfering in a progressive way. Right. This is
one of those issues where you've got the culture clash
from two different organizations, and when they merged together, you
have to figure out how to reconcile that. Yeah, but
(09:48):
that being said, by September of two thousand five, my
Space was up to twenty seven million members, and in
the following year they would become the most popular, the
top social network site in the United States. Now, again,
to be fair, at least, when two thousand six opens,
you're looking at a pretty barren field for social networking sites. Right,
(10:10):
Facebook was only open to college students. Facebook had launched
in two thousand four, and by two thousand and six
they were open to more than a couple of dozen
college campuses. But if you didn't have a valid college email,
you could not have That was frustrating because I had
friends who do theater, so I've got friends all over
the age spectrum, and I had some older friends who
(10:31):
were using their old college emails to get in, and
I was very envious. I had already graduated college, so
I didn't have the opportunity, and I didn't maintain a
college email address. So yeah, I was not able to
get a Facebook account when it first opened. Also, why
would any one already have my Space and my Space
didn't have that restriction. Also, at this time, my Space
(10:56):
lands a really good deal. They make a deal with
Google and exclusive deal for ads for three years for
nine d million dollars based on site traffic. That's an enormous,
enormous ad deal, obviously, Yes. However, it had an effect
on the user experience as well, right, yes, because it
was an enormous ad deal, which meant an enormous amount
(11:18):
of ads, which made these already cluttered sites even more
cluttered with things that you couldn't necessarily turn off. All
of these ads that my Space wanted to push the
whole behind purpose for my Space. And meanwhile, my Space
was also starting to get into some trouble due to
the fact that there were these rather lascivious, provocative images,
(11:42):
let us say, racy as you have put in photos,
and this was that was like one of the initial
strategies that they had to attract people to the site.
But now they were starting to get a lot more
attention about these racy photos and to the point where
people were starting to question whether or not my Space
might even be a porn site. Yeah. Yeah, there were
(12:05):
investigations launched to figure out whether they were exposing pornography
to minors. So now you've got people thinking, well, maybe
this isn't the safest place for me or my family.
Maybe instead, I should look to alternatives, and Facebook was
right around the corner. In September two thousand six, Facebook
would open up the platform so that anyone with an
(12:27):
email address who was thirteen years or older could get
a Facebook profile. Now people did and do still get
around that age limit. Despite all that, in two thousand seven,
my Space is still going strong, despite the people saying, well,
maybe I should try Facebook. Facebook might be a safer
place for us. And despite the reputation, my Space had
about three hundred million registered users and a evaluation of
(12:51):
twelve billion. Twelve that's based on numbers that may or
may not come true, So right, that's a number that's off.
The cited that twelve billion dollar valuation. It is very
difficult to nail down exactly where that value was. It
was largely in the promise of having three million people
(13:12):
and an x amount of landscape where they could potentially
show advertising, and a estimation of how much those ads
would be worth. It was based on a lot of
estimations essentially. However, at this time in my Space's heyday
of use, news Corps decides that it wants to start
(13:32):
focusing on something else, and that's something else is trying
to buy the Wall Street Journal, and meanwhile, Facebook is
starting to catch up. It had not caught up entirely
to my Space yet, but it was chomping at the heels.
So here's my Space at its peak, valued at twelve
billion dollars tons of users. Facebook is catching up. But
it looked like at the time that even if Facebook
did catch up, there'd still be plenty of room for
(13:54):
both platforms to coexist. However, as it turns out, even
though no one was sure about it yet, my Space
was actually on the brink and it was just about
to fall off. We'll explain more in just a moment,
but first let's take a break to thank our sponsor. Alright,
(14:20):
So by two thousand and eight, my Space was making
good money for social media site. Again, not a whole
lot of competition out there, but they're making good money
one hundred million dollars in counting. Later on in two
thousand eight, Facebook takes their number one spot for a
number of users. My Space was still getting more traffic
until two thousand nine, but Facebook just had more users
(14:40):
than my Space, and by the way, that would never
change Facebook. Facebook would never lose that spot to my
Space from this point moving forward, So while my Space
still had more traffic on a day to day basis,
that was limited because Facebook was already in the lead,
and it was never kind of look back. It's fair
(15:00):
to note that Facebook at this time in two thousand
and eight was already ahead of my Space overseas. This
is when it overtook my Space in the United States,
so a complete overtake in that regard, and right towards
the end of two thousand eight and into the beginning
of two thousand nine, another big change happens. D Wolf
and Anderson both leave the company, so that the co
founders of my Space leave at that point, and they
(15:24):
both have had things to say about the direction of
my Space, both when they were running it and when
news Corps took over, and they're fairly candid. In fact,
I've read interviews where they were pretty clear about their
own mistakes. It wasn't just pointing at news Corps saying
they're the reason that things massed up. They said, we
(15:45):
made some bad decisions. Tom Anderson, for one, said I
had this social aspect in my head from the beginning,
but instead of building it from the onset, we kind
of tried to overlay it later on, and that was
more difficult than we expected, right, but the wolf would
leave first. He would step down officially on April twenty second,
two nine. And at this point cracks were starting to
(16:06):
show in my Space. So this got to a point
also where we have to talk about a feature my
Space had that paradoxically hurt the company, although it's something
we normally associate with good business practice, which is transparency. Yeah.
On Facebook and a lot of social media applications, you
cannot see when somebody unfriends you or leaves the site. Yeah,
(16:29):
Like on Twitter, if someone and follows me, I don't
automatically know. Yeah. On Facebook, you can decline someone's friend
request and unless they follow up on it, they won't know.
Or you can defriend them later and again unless they
follow up on it and say, hey, why am I
not seeing posts from this person? They don't know, which
is you know, can be good or bad depending on
how many people that person is following. But on my Space,
(16:52):
when you try to access somebody's account, you can see
the last time they accessed it and whether they are
an active user or not. So if you go on
and you see that these people that you were following
are no longer using my Space, either frequently or at all,
You might go, why am I even still here? Why
am I here? Maybe I should stop using it too,
So that ended up actually being a weakness for my Space.
(17:15):
One of the other things that was starting to become
clear is that Facebook had been built from the ground
up as this social networking platform, whereas my Space had
come from more of an entertainment perspective. And in fact,
my Space would really lean into that entertainment side quite
a bit as time would go on, it would double
(17:37):
and triple and quadruple down on being related to entertainment,
largely the music industry, but not only the music Yeah yeah, well,
I mean largely music industry because they were the first
adopters pretty much. And then one of the other things
that differentiated my Space from Facebook was that on Facebook,
if you wanted a profile, you had to use your
(17:58):
actual name, and my Space they wanted you to use
a handle or you know, an alias. And this requires
some backtracking a little bit. Back in the early days
of the Internet, the general thought was that you would
use a handle a nickname everywhere you wouldn't share genuine
personal information that's not safe It's so different now. Now
(18:20):
we get into cars with people that we don't know
that we used an app on our phone to connect
to right. But back then you wouldn't share your name online.
It was considered to be dangerous potentially. However, what it
also allowed you to do on Facebook was look for
your friends and your family who also had profiles and
(18:41):
make it very easy to connect with them. On my Space,
it was not easy to connect with people you knew
because my Space depended upon shared interests, not whether or
not you know that person in real life. So you
could share your MySpace user name with people and they
could add you that way, but there was no easy
way with in the network itself for you to track
(19:03):
down your friends and your family. You just had to
hope that we're friends like the same weird stuff you liked,
and sadly not enough people like eating jello and their
underwear while listening to they might be giants. So I
had hardly any friends, which I don't understand at all.
That's like the best thing, don't knock it to get
trying people. They also had poor product developments, so my
(19:24):
Space made a bunch of products and features. As we said,
they were rolled out slowly, but maybe not slowly enough.
They were poorly built, and they had a lot of bugs,
and it cost a lot of frustration among the users.
Yea Krista Wolf would say that one of the big
reasons he felt my Space faltered was that they were
spread too thin. They had all these ideas for different
features they wanted, and instead of contracting that out or
(19:47):
inviting developers to work on the platform with them, they
decided to try and tackle it all themselves, and they
just didn't have the skill set to do it, nor
did they have the focus because they were trying to
do too many things at once, and so what you
ended up with, we're a bunch of half baked features
that didn't work so well and just added to that
user experience frustration. Meanwhile, Facebook was taking the different approach.
(20:10):
They opened up an a p I and application programm
er interface and they said, if you want to build
applications on top of the Facebook platform, do it. And
that meant that you had teams that were really focused
on creating very specific functions and they could make it really,
(20:30):
really great because that's all they were working on. They
just wanted to make that one thing. My Space was
trying to make all of the one things. Yeah. Yeah,
so my Space had a bunch of feature bloat on
top of their ads, yeah, just making it even more messy. Yeah.
And they also tried to go more global at that time,
and unfortunately the expansion they couldn't really make a lot
(20:54):
of progress because Facebook had really taken most of those
markets already. The one place that was an exception was Mexico. Yeah,
so in two nine they do it all companies facing
the brink do and they lay off a bunch of
employees their employees, right, that was pretty rough. They also, uh,
this was something I did not know until I read
(21:15):
the notes that you had put together for this episode.
My Space was in some ways a banner child for
the wasteful startup, even though at this point they were
no longer a startup. They were part of a much
larger company. One of the things I often associate in
my head with startup companies is ostentatious expensive office space
(21:38):
that tends to emphasize style over function. MySpace managed to
go one better than that. Yeah, they were paying a
million dollars a month for an office in Paia Vista,
and they never actually moved in they might have had
intentions to, but they didn't. So they're paying a million
dollars a month for an empty office space. Yes, wow,
(22:00):
all right, yeah, so that that's by the way, we're
gonna have some lessons at the end of this episode
about about things that my Space did wrong. I'm just
gonna cut to the chase here. That's bad businesses to
pay a million dollars for space that you're not using.
And news Corps would eventually in say, you know, maybe
we made a few missteps. We might not have done
(22:20):
this the best way over the last couple of years,
which was the entire time that they had had my Space. Yeah,
they're like three or four years, you know, like you've
had five, so the first year you were good. In
two and ten they also decided what we're going to
fix that, We're just gonna try to copy Facebook, and
they even integrated with Facebook Connect, but it was too late. Yeah,
(22:41):
people who were interested in Facebook on Facebook, they need
to have a second Facebook to their Facebook. It wasn't
that mean, yo, dog, I see who like Facebook? So
I put Facebook in your Facebook? And yeah, but there
there's a common theory that if they had started copying
Facebook from the beginning that maybe they could have they
would have just been Facebook. They would have hold on
to their their user base, and then Facebook would have
(23:02):
only been an aging college population. Yeah, which is what
they did in the first place, because they copied friends
stre so they didn't follow their own success line. And
Mike Jones, who was the CEO of the company, was
essentially he said, We're not really a social networking site anymore.
We're not like Facebook now. We are a social entertainment destination.
(23:24):
And this was really where we saw a big push
to redefine my Space. Unfortunately, my Space as popularity had
fallen so much that this rebranding, even though it would
take place a couple of different times, like they tried
rebranding a couple of times, didn't have the impact needed
to really bring my Space back force. So they tried
(23:47):
to just be a complementary service. Bands could use to
Facebook to promote their music, which is still something that
happens today. Although I'm surprised because it's only bands discovering
other bands, I would imagine, I mean it's I will
say that if you want to check out music and
music videos, the way it works on my Space is
way easier than on Facebook. Facebook is not well designed
(24:10):
for that now it's not. However, everything else, like all
the people you know, tend to be on Facebook. So
there's still is not that much call to go over
to my Space. So my Space knew it was, you know,
I said, we're an entertainment hub. They were predicting a
loss of a hundred and sixty five million dollars in
two thousand eleven. That was the expected loss after laying
(24:33):
off a large amount of people, leaving them with like
only four dred and fifty employees. They had had almost
a thousand more than that just a couple of years earlier. Yeah,
and and then that year their users dropped by nine million.
That's that's a lot of people. Yeah. And then in
two thousand eleven, one of the most infamous deals in
(24:54):
business history, let alone the Tech Business History News Corps
would sell my Space. They tried to sell my Space
for around a hundred million dollars, but they eventually had
to settle for thirty five million dollars at least that's
what was reported. That million dollar price tag. That is
a tiny fraction of what they paid for it. Yeah,
(25:16):
and at that point they were losing about forty million
users a year over and all overall, and you know,
you're looking at a half billion dollar loss if you're
looking at how much they paid to acquire my Space
versus how much they got when they sold it, and
they laid off half of the employees who were still
there at this point, it was looking really really ugly.
(25:40):
By the way, we'll talk in a second about the
company that bought my Space, because that is another interesting
part of this story. Before we do that, we're gonna
take a quick break. So my Space get purchased for
(26:00):
thirty five million dollars pennies on the dollar for what
News Corps paid for it. Who bought it, well, a
couple of people were looking at it, but the people
who ended up buying it were Specific Media, and justin Timberlake,
he brought Sexy back, he did, and he did not
say bye bye bye. He brought he brought Sexy back,
(26:22):
and he bought my Space along with Specific Media. Now
they were really looking at turning my Space into more
of this sort of destination for a social music kind
of platform where you could discover music, you could find
other people who are into the same sort of music
(26:42):
you were in. It was meant to be kind of
the way my Space had originally launched, but with a
very slick redesign. But again, this happened pretty late in
the game, and I don't think like I remember I
went back to my Space to check it out after
this happened, because I was very curious once it was redesigned,
(27:02):
and while I thought it was a slick redesign, I
could find no reason to go back frequently, and so
it would only be if I just happened to think
about it every few months, like I wonder what my
Space looks like now. So they still are a music
and entertainment consumption site. In two thousand fifteen, Specific Media
rebranded to volant Tech Ye, and then the following year,
(27:24):
Volant tech was purchased by Time Incorporated. I love that
one of the articles about this acquisition was Time accidentally
buys my Space. Yes, but it was because multiple things.
One they were buying the overall company, not just my Space. Two.
One of the things that my Space had was still
incredibly valuable, and that was the information about all the
(27:47):
people who had had my Space accounts. Yes, so this
is when I went back to my Space to see
if I could find my old account, which of course
I could not, but they still have all my information
what I put in there, and that know, information is valuable.
Their entire companies that exist just to broker information across
in order to make add deals that kind of stuff.
(28:09):
And so really, when you look at it, the deal
that Time made was not really for my Space necessarily.
It was really for the one billion registered user data base.
That's what it really was about. Now you know, all
this being said, all of this sadness about my Space,
it is something we should note. Facebook as of this recording,
(28:30):
is losing some of its younger user base because technology
it evolves. Yeah. Well, and also you get to a
point where young people who are growing up look at
a social network that seems to have all older people
on it and they want something for themselves, right, They
don't want to go to where all the old people
are hanging out. Which is a large reason why a
(28:53):
lot of the Facebook folks didn't have any interest in
moving over to my Space. That my Space was viewed
as the place where adults in total pervert were hanging
out because of this terrible reputation, so people stuck to Facebook.
And then now you have you know, that was a
decade ago. So now you have a different generation who says, well,
I don't really going to fit moms on Facebook? Do
I want to go to Facebook? Well, and there's this
(29:14):
other thing going on where a lot of the younger
generation doesn't want to put things up that can be
found forever. So you put something on Facebook, you can
change your privacy settings, but largely it's in the inner
space forever unless you go back and delete it. Where's
something like Snapchat at least has the appearance of it deleting,
although that story is more complicated than that. Also, in
(29:35):
the interest of full disclosure, both of us have moms
who are on Facebook. Yes, and also Facebook does have
their story feature, which is similar to Snapchat. You put
something up, it's only there for a brief period of time,
although how long that stays on a server is another question. Yes,
And here are some lessons I like learning that we
can learn from my Space some stuff that that really
(29:56):
kind of sums up the issue with the braink Here.
One is that they found out that focusing on monetization
over user experience is a dangerous thing. And when it
went to the extreme that my Space did, it ends
up hurting the business in the long run. Now, that's
not to say that you can't focus on monetization. Facebook
obviously did and did quite well gradually. Yeah, they kind
(30:19):
of focused on building the social side first and then
the monetization, whereas my Space sort of flipped that. Another
was that the kitchen sink approach to designing and implementing
new features means you're not really going to do anything. Well.
You might end up with a lot of new features,
but you probably didn't make them as good as you
had intended. It's going to be a frustrating experience to
(30:40):
use them, and it may not add anything to the
user experience at least nothing positive at the end of
the way. And so you really need to be picky
and choosy about those features and and maybe ask the
question what do the users actually want? You know, not
all of us can be Steve Jobs, where we come
out and tell you what you want and then you realize, oh,
I do want to yes, So don't try to be
(31:01):
Steve Jobs. If you're not Steve Jobs. Not everybody wants
to go to somebody's profile and have guar blasted at them. Yeah. Also,
by relying on aliases and handles that old style of
the approach to the internet. MySpace made it very hard
to connect with people that you actually knew. Facebook made
it very easy. So this plays into something that's social
(31:23):
networking experts. And when I say social networking, I don't
just mean online social networks, I mean you can just yeah,
it could just be your friends, just your group of
friends right beyond, like computers are not even involved. But
social networking experts say that the Facebook approach allowed for
creating strong triadic closures, which is an interesting concept. The
(31:44):
basic idea of a triadic closure when it comes to
friends is where link gets the sword and no, that's
the try force closure. The triadic closure aerial is when
you see that two people have a friend in common. Right,
Let's say that you and I both have a common friend,
but we don't know each other yet. So ariel you
(32:05):
have this one friend, I have that one friend, and
we're both really close with that one person. The triadic
closure thought experiment goes that people who have very strong
friend connections to a common friend are more likely to
also become friends. Facebook's model works on that principle as well.
Because I'm sure you've had this experience where you visited
(32:29):
a person's profile and you see someone may be active
on that profile. I got that person sounds interesting, and
then over time you start interacting with that person and
you become friends. Right. Um. And also you find out
on Facebook that the world is much smaller than you
thought it was, and you'll find out that people that
you know in totally different circles somehow know each other
and that seems wrong. And then your brain explodes and
(32:51):
you lay on the ground eating ice cream with a
cat laying on your head for hours. Yes, so those
are the lessons we've learned from my space that cats
laying on your head are very good at soothing you,
and they're great therapy. And also just the thought of
being too big to fail is toxic. You cannot take
that philosophy to heart. I mean Facebook is always in
(33:13):
danger of doing that as well. And while Facebook now
is larger than MySpace ever was, it's not to say
that it's always going to be there, you know, it's
a It's a thing that is worth remembering is that
it's always possible there's another social networking site down the line,
or even something totally different that we can't anticipate just
now that will quote unquote take down Facebook the way
(33:36):
Facebook took down my Space. So fascinating story. And if
you ever do a search for worst business acquisitions, the
news Core MySpace one is almost always on that list.
It was just it was not unfortunate, not the most
expensive by any stretch of the imagination. There were bigger
deals that went bad, but it was one that was
(33:58):
just very, very high profile, and it also was one
where a lot of people felt like it would be
difficult to mess it up because my Space was so
far ahead when it was all happening. But there you
can mess it up. Well, I'm glad we were able
to revisit this. I'm sad Tom is no longer my friend.
You know what, I bet he still is, just in
(34:18):
his heart, in his heart, he is still still friends
with my Space people. Well that's sweet of Tom. I
appreciate that, Tom. And until next time, this has been
the Brink and I have been Jonathan Stricklin and I
have been aerial casting. If you would like to learn
more about what we've talked about, as well as keep
(34:39):
track of all of our episodes, make sure you visit
our website at the brink podcast dot show, or you
can email us at feedback at the brink podcast Dot show.
My Space where friend zone was a good thing. Founded
in two thousand three, this social media outlet was a
leader in its arena, defining much of what we know
about social media today. But despite everyone having a mutual
friend and Tom, in two thousand eight, a bunch of
four business decisions and lack of competitive edge would make
them lose a lot of friends and followers to Facebook,
(00:29):
but my Space continued to cling on like that quiet
childhood classmate or that weird cousin you keep in touch
with just out of obligation. So let's poke around and
share the secrets of what took this social media platform
out of the friend zone and into a forgotten link.
This is my Space on the Brink. Hi, I'm Jonathan
(01:00):
Strictly and I'm Aerial Casting, and you're listening to the
Brink where we are exploring the almost forgotten website my Space.
I mean it still exists, like we said, yeah, But
I mean I think there are people who might be
listening to this podcast right now who are like, what
is what is my Space? Or I've heard of that,
but I've never seen it. So interest of full disclosure,
(01:23):
Ariel and I both at least once upon a time
had active MySpace accounts. Yes, I think I maybe added
two things to mine. I was a desperate clinger to
live journal prior to joining Facebook, but I kind of
made an almost direct link I had in my Space,
but I didn't utilize it. I used my Space quite
a bit for a while, and I clung to it
(01:45):
for a while. I actually had a MySpace profile, and
when when Facebook finally opened up and allowed old people
like me who were no longer college students to finally join,
I maintain both and MySpace and a Facebook file. But
they did fall off the brink. I would argue, like
the value of that company plummeted to a ridiculous amount.
(02:10):
When you look at how much it was valued at
its peak versus how much it was last sold for.
It was a phenomenal difference. But like we said, they
didn't completely go away, so they just fell into obscurity. Yeah,
so it's not like this is one of those stories
where you have a company that has gone into say bankruptcy,
and just sort of faded out. Even our Toys or
(02:32):
Us story, we talked about how that company seemingly was
gone for good and then now there's a an effort
to sort of resurrect the brand. My Space never quite
went to fully dead. It's only mostly dead. Yeah, So
let's talk a little bit about history before we get
into what happened. Sure. So my Space was founded in
(02:53):
two thousand three, as we said in the intro, by
Christy Wolfe and Tom Anderson. Tom Anderson being your friend
to Tom. When you get joined, everybody gets a friend
with Tom, or did. At least in the beginning, they
weren't actually a social media site. There were an e
marketing site called the Universe and they sold things like
diet pills and stuff you might google to see is
(03:15):
this actually legit? Yeah, And they were looking around at
some of the other sites that were starting to get popularity,
and we could even do an episode on this social
media platform. At some point, they were looking at a
thing that was called Friendster. Now, did you have a
friends Stair account? I did not. Friendster was one of
those things that came and went before I ever. I
(03:35):
think maybe I checked it out once or twice, but
I never made an event uh profile for it. There
are a couple of social media sites that fall into
that category. But they looked at Friendster. It was a
popular site. They saw that there was a lot of
what we would now call engagement, and they thought, we
want to see that kind of activity on what we're
(03:57):
working on. How can we do that? Yeah, Yeah, so
they've basically just copied it. So that turned out to
be a working strategy. Yeah, And it was specifically so
that they could do what is called influencer marketing. Yeah,
this is something that we're all pretty familiar with these days. It's,
you know the idea of people who get big followings
on social media and then brands will reach out to
(04:19):
them and have those people leverage their fame to market
on behalf of those brands. Yeah. So what they did
to get those influencers was they went and they recruited
all of the quote unquote hot girls that Friendster had
kicked off of their social media site to join my
Space um, as well as bands and photographers, really anybody
(04:40):
who your average Joe Schmo would want to follow and
be a internet friend of. Yeah. So essentially, the the
tried and true method of how can we attract people
to this site? Well, for guys, let's just give them
the feeling that all these extremely attractive women want to
(05:01):
be friends with. Yes, the strategy did work. However, later on,
much much later on, analysts would say that using that
strategy was sort of a predictor that my Space would
inevitably fail because they were coming at the angle of
creating a social networking platform from the wrong position, that
(05:22):
they weren't doing it as social networking first, then find
a way to monetize it. They were looking at a
way to monetize something, and they went to the social
networking site. Now, in defense of my Space, there wasn't
a whole lot of precedent for what they were doing.
I think that focusing on on the individual instead of
on the networking it's it's something that is called Read's
law actually, where they say that the success of a
(05:44):
social network is to get the people to connect with
each other and do so within groups. Yeah. If you
get the more people you can get active on your
social networking site, the more valuable the site is. So,
and it has to do with not just not really
just the number, but also the value of the connections
between the people. And as we will discover, one of
(06:07):
my spaces challenges was allowing for those meaningful connections to
have Yeah. Yeah. In two thousand four, my Space breaks
one million users, a month, and now they're getting some
bigger names to promote their site, like R. E. M.
And we're familiar with because you know those are local
boys athletes Georgia. And they made some design decisions that
(06:30):
were interesting. Yeah, I mean at face value, they seem
pretty cool. They decided to let the members guide how
to build this site, so anybody could take their profile
page and add whatever widgets, videos, backgrounds, backgrounds, articles they
wanted to special cursors. Yeah, which you know, from a
user standpoint like, this is super customizable. This is really cool,
(06:52):
but in actuality it just led to a bunch of
really messy cluttered stuff. Yeah. Eye source. With ucebook profiles,
you know, you can add things like photos. You can
change out your little cover photo at the top and
your profile picture, and if you want to, you can
do things that affect your Facebook profile but not anyone else's,
Like you could change the language like the pirate or something.
(07:15):
But my Space had it where you could actually change
the appearance of your profile, the background color. You could
put a photo up like that could be like a
tiled photo as your background cover. You could put in
various songs that were connected to MySpace, so you could
have songs playing automatically if you wanted to so as
soon as someone visited your profile, you know, Matchbox. So
(07:41):
it was definitely one of those things that I felt. One,
there was not a cohesive experience, right, you could go
to two different profiles and have two wildly different reactions
to it. And for another, it meant that a lot
of people just kind of took a kitchen sink approach
to their profiles, like any any sort of switched they
could toggle on, they were going to toggle and it
(08:03):
made it super irritating. It actually reminded me a lot
of Geo Cities, which is another company we could cover
on the brink at some point. So not the best
experience once these things were all implemented, although many of
them were introduced over time, so it wasn't like it
just instantaneously went to an ice ore. Yeah, and it
didn't have a negative effect immediately. In fact, my space
(08:24):
is doing so well that in two thousand and five
it was purchased by News Corps headed by Rupert Murdoch
for five and eighty million dollars. Yeah, that more than
half a billion dollars. Now at the time, people thought
that's a whole lot of money. Right now, in retrospect,
people have said that was way too much money. And
(08:45):
part of this was because they were in a bidding war.
Wasn't just that they were Yeah, they were actually fighting
with Viacom to buy it. So this this was something
where you had two very wealthy companies with very deep
pockets ready to go after the same property. Things didn't
go sour immediately. Again, the narrative tends to be the
(09:06):
news Core spent way too much money buying my Space
and then my Space tanked, But in reality that's not
exactly what happened. No, so news Corp bought my Space,
They're like, you guys, do your thing. Yeah, we're not
gonna micromanage. Yeah, but they're a big company, and so
with a big company comes red tape to make any changes,
(09:26):
to develop things, to resolve conflicts. And so even though
they didn't intend to interfere, they were still interfering. But
they weren't interfering in a progressive way. Right. This is
one of those issues where you've got the culture clash
from two different organizations, and when they merged together, you
have to figure out how to reconcile that. Yeah, but
(09:48):
that being said, by September of two thousand five, my
Space was up to twenty seven million members, and in
the following year they would become the most popular, the
top social network site in the United States. Now, again,
to be fair, at least, when two thousand six opens,
you're looking at a pretty barren field for social networking sites. Right,
(10:10):
Facebook was only open to college students. Facebook had launched
in two thousand four, and by two thousand and six
they were open to more than a couple of dozen
college campuses. But if you didn't have a valid college email,
you could not have That was frustrating because I had
friends who do theater, so I've got friends all over
the age spectrum, and I had some older friends who
(10:31):
were using their old college emails to get in, and
I was very envious. I had already graduated college, so
I didn't have the opportunity, and I didn't maintain a
college email address. So yeah, I was not able to
get a Facebook account when it first opened. Also, why
would any one already have my Space and my Space
didn't have that restriction. Also, at this time, my Space
(10:56):
lands a really good deal. They make a deal with
Google and exclusive deal for ads for three years for
nine d million dollars based on site traffic. That's an enormous,
enormous ad deal, obviously, Yes. However, it had an effect
on the user experience as well, right, yes, because it
was an enormous ad deal, which meant an enormous amount
(11:18):
of ads, which made these already cluttered sites even more
cluttered with things that you couldn't necessarily turn off. All
of these ads that my Space wanted to push the
whole behind purpose for my Space. And meanwhile, my Space
was also starting to get into some trouble due to
the fact that there were these rather lascivious, provocative images,
(11:42):
let us say, racy as you have put in photos,
and this was that was like one of the initial
strategies that they had to attract people to the site.
But now they were starting to get a lot more
attention about these racy photos and to the point where
people were starting to question whether or not my Space
might even be a porn site. Yeah. Yeah, there were
(12:05):
investigations launched to figure out whether they were exposing pornography
to minors. So now you've got people thinking, well, maybe
this isn't the safest place for me or my family.
Maybe instead, I should look to alternatives, and Facebook was
right around the corner. In September two thousand six, Facebook
would open up the platform so that anyone with an
(12:27):
email address who was thirteen years or older could get
a Facebook profile. Now people did and do still get
around that age limit. Despite all that, in two thousand seven,
my Space is still going strong, despite the people saying, well,
maybe I should try Facebook. Facebook might be a safer
place for us. And despite the reputation, my Space had
about three hundred million registered users and a evaluation of
(12:51):
twelve billion. Twelve that's based on numbers that may or
may not come true, So right, that's a number that's off.
The cited that twelve billion dollar valuation. It is very
difficult to nail down exactly where that value was. It
was largely in the promise of having three million people
(13:12):
and an x amount of landscape where they could potentially
show advertising, and a estimation of how much those ads
would be worth. It was based on a lot of
estimations essentially. However, at this time in my Space's heyday
of use, news Corps decides that it wants to start
(13:32):
focusing on something else, and that's something else is trying
to buy the Wall Street Journal, and meanwhile, Facebook is
starting to catch up. It had not caught up entirely
to my Space yet, but it was chomping at the heels.
So here's my Space at its peak, valued at twelve
billion dollars tons of users. Facebook is catching up. But
it looked like at the time that even if Facebook
did catch up, there'd still be plenty of room for
(13:54):
both platforms to coexist. However, as it turns out, even
though no one was sure about it yet, my Space
was actually on the brink and it was just about
to fall off. We'll explain more in just a moment,
but first let's take a break to thank our sponsor. Alright,
(14:20):
So by two thousand and eight, my Space was making
good money for social media site. Again, not a whole
lot of competition out there, but they're making good money
one hundred million dollars in counting. Later on in two
thousand eight, Facebook takes their number one spot for a
number of users. My Space was still getting more traffic
until two thousand nine, but Facebook just had more users
(14:40):
than my Space, and by the way, that would never
change Facebook. Facebook would never lose that spot to my
Space from this point moving forward, So while my Space
still had more traffic on a day to day basis,
that was limited because Facebook was already in the lead,
and it was never kind of look back. It's fair
(15:00):
to note that Facebook at this time in two thousand
and eight was already ahead of my Space overseas. This
is when it overtook my Space in the United States,
so a complete overtake in that regard, and right towards
the end of two thousand eight and into the beginning
of two thousand nine, another big change happens. D Wolf
and Anderson both leave the company, so that the co
founders of my Space leave at that point, and they
(15:24):
both have had things to say about the direction of
my Space, both when they were running it and when
news Corps took over, and they're fairly candid. In fact,
I've read interviews where they were pretty clear about their
own mistakes. It wasn't just pointing at news Corps saying
they're the reason that things massed up. They said, we
(15:45):
made some bad decisions. Tom Anderson, for one, said I
had this social aspect in my head from the beginning,
but instead of building it from the onset, we kind
of tried to overlay it later on, and that was
more difficult than we expected, right, but the wolf would
leave first. He would step down officially on April twenty second,
two nine. And at this point cracks were starting to
(16:06):
show in my Space. So this got to a point
also where we have to talk about a feature my
Space had that paradoxically hurt the company, although it's something
we normally associate with good business practice, which is transparency. Yeah.
On Facebook and a lot of social media applications, you
cannot see when somebody unfriends you or leaves the site. Yeah,
(16:29):
Like on Twitter, if someone and follows me, I don't
automatically know. Yeah. On Facebook, you can decline someone's friend
request and unless they follow up on it, they won't know.
Or you can defriend them later and again unless they
follow up on it and say, hey, why am I
not seeing posts from this person? They don't know, which
is you know, can be good or bad depending on
how many people that person is following. But on my Space,
(16:52):
when you try to access somebody's account, you can see
the last time they accessed it and whether they are
an active user or not. So if you go on
and you see that these people that you were following
are no longer using my Space, either frequently or at all,
You might go, why am I even still here? Why
am I here? Maybe I should stop using it too,
So that ended up actually being a weakness for my Space.
(17:15):
One of the other things that was starting to become
clear is that Facebook had been built from the ground
up as this social networking platform, whereas my Space had
come from more of an entertainment perspective. And in fact,
my Space would really lean into that entertainment side quite
a bit as time would go on, it would double
(17:37):
and triple and quadruple down on being related to entertainment,
largely the music industry, but not only the music Yeah yeah, well,
I mean largely music industry because they were the first
adopters pretty much. And then one of the other things
that differentiated my Space from Facebook was that on Facebook,
if you wanted a profile, you had to use your
(17:58):
actual name, and my Space they wanted you to use
a handle or you know, an alias. And this requires
some backtracking a little bit. Back in the early days
of the Internet, the general thought was that you would
use a handle a nickname everywhere you wouldn't share genuine
personal information that's not safe It's so different now. Now
(18:20):
we get into cars with people that we don't know
that we used an app on our phone to connect
to right. But back then you wouldn't share your name online.
It was considered to be dangerous potentially. However, what it
also allowed you to do on Facebook was look for
your friends and your family who also had profiles and
(18:41):
make it very easy to connect with them. On my Space,
it was not easy to connect with people you knew
because my Space depended upon shared interests, not whether or
not you know that person in real life. So you
could share your MySpace user name with people and they
could add you that way, but there was no easy
way with in the network itself for you to track
(19:03):
down your friends and your family. You just had to
hope that we're friends like the same weird stuff you liked,
and sadly not enough people like eating jello and their
underwear while listening to they might be giants. So I
had hardly any friends, which I don't understand at all.
That's like the best thing, don't knock it to get
trying people. They also had poor product developments, so my
(19:24):
Space made a bunch of products and features. As we said,
they were rolled out slowly, but maybe not slowly enough.
They were poorly built, and they had a lot of bugs,
and it cost a lot of frustration among the users.
Yea Krista Wolf would say that one of the big
reasons he felt my Space faltered was that they were
spread too thin. They had all these ideas for different
features they wanted, and instead of contracting that out or
(19:47):
inviting developers to work on the platform with them, they
decided to try and tackle it all themselves, and they
just didn't have the skill set to do it, nor
did they have the focus because they were trying to
do too many things at once, and so what you
ended up with, we're a bunch of half baked features
that didn't work so well and just added to that
user experience frustration. Meanwhile, Facebook was taking the different approach.
(20:10):
They opened up an a p I and application programm
er interface and they said, if you want to build
applications on top of the Facebook platform, do it. And
that meant that you had teams that were really focused
on creating very specific functions and they could make it really,
(20:30):
really great because that's all they were working on. They
just wanted to make that one thing. My Space was
trying to make all of the one things. Yeah. Yeah,
so my Space had a bunch of feature bloat on
top of their ads, yeah, just making it even more messy. Yeah.
And they also tried to go more global at that time,
and unfortunately the expansion they couldn't really make a lot
(20:54):
of progress because Facebook had really taken most of those
markets already. The one place that was an exception was Mexico. Yeah,
so in two nine they do it all companies facing
the brink do and they lay off a bunch of
employees their employees, right, that was pretty rough. They also, uh,
this was something I did not know until I read
(21:15):
the notes that you had put together for this episode.
My Space was in some ways a banner child for
the wasteful startup, even though at this point they were
no longer a startup. They were part of a much
larger company. One of the things I often associate in
my head with startup companies is ostentatious expensive office space
(21:38):
that tends to emphasize style over function. MySpace managed to
go one better than that. Yeah, they were paying a
million dollars a month for an office in Paia Vista,
and they never actually moved in they might have had
intentions to, but they didn't. So they're paying a million
dollars a month for an empty office space. Yes, wow,
(22:00):
all right, yeah, so that that's by the way, we're
gonna have some lessons at the end of this episode
about about things that my Space did wrong. I'm just
gonna cut to the chase here. That's bad businesses to
pay a million dollars for space that you're not using.
And news Corps would eventually in say, you know, maybe
we made a few missteps. We might not have done
(22:20):
this the best way over the last couple of years,
which was the entire time that they had had my Space. Yeah,
they're like three or four years, you know, like you've
had five, so the first year you were good. In
two and ten they also decided what we're going to
fix that, We're just gonna try to copy Facebook, and
they even integrated with Facebook Connect, but it was too late. Yeah,
(22:41):
people who were interested in Facebook on Facebook, they need
to have a second Facebook to their Facebook. It wasn't
that mean, yo, dog, I see who like Facebook? So
I put Facebook in your Facebook? And yeah, but there
there's a common theory that if they had started copying
Facebook from the beginning that maybe they could have they
would have just been Facebook. They would have hold on
to their their user base, and then Facebook would have
(23:02):
only been an aging college population. Yeah, which is what
they did in the first place, because they copied friends
stre so they didn't follow their own success line. And
Mike Jones, who was the CEO of the company, was
essentially he said, We're not really a social networking site anymore.
We're not like Facebook now. We are a social entertainment destination.
(23:24):
And this was really where we saw a big push
to redefine my Space. Unfortunately, my Space as popularity had
fallen so much that this rebranding, even though it would
take place a couple of different times, like they tried
rebranding a couple of times, didn't have the impact needed
to really bring my Space back force. So they tried
(23:47):
to just be a complementary service. Bands could use to
Facebook to promote their music, which is still something that
happens today. Although I'm surprised because it's only bands discovering
other bands, I would imagine, I mean it's I will
say that if you want to check out music and
music videos, the way it works on my Space is
way easier than on Facebook. Facebook is not well designed
(24:10):
for that now it's not. However, everything else, like all
the people you know, tend to be on Facebook. So
there's still is not that much call to go over
to my Space. So my Space knew it was, you know,
I said, we're an entertainment hub. They were predicting a
loss of a hundred and sixty five million dollars in
two thousand eleven. That was the expected loss after laying
(24:33):
off a large amount of people, leaving them with like
only four dred and fifty employees. They had had almost
a thousand more than that just a couple of years earlier. Yeah,
and and then that year their users dropped by nine million.
That's that's a lot of people. Yeah. And then in
two thousand eleven, one of the most infamous deals in
(24:54):
business history, let alone the Tech Business History News Corps
would sell my Space. They tried to sell my Space
for around a hundred million dollars, but they eventually had
to settle for thirty five million dollars at least that's
what was reported. That million dollar price tag. That is
a tiny fraction of what they paid for it. Yeah,
(25:16):
and at that point they were losing about forty million
users a year over and all overall, and you know,
you're looking at a half billion dollar loss if you're
looking at how much they paid to acquire my Space
versus how much they got when they sold it, and
they laid off half of the employees who were still
there at this point, it was looking really really ugly.
(25:40):
By the way, we'll talk in a second about the
company that bought my Space, because that is another interesting
part of this story. Before we do that, we're gonna
take a quick break. So my Space get purchased for
(26:00):
thirty five million dollars pennies on the dollar for what
News Corps paid for it. Who bought it, well, a
couple of people were looking at it, but the people
who ended up buying it were Specific Media, and justin Timberlake,
he brought Sexy back, he did, and he did not
say bye bye bye. He brought he brought Sexy back,
(26:22):
and he bought my Space along with Specific Media. Now
they were really looking at turning my Space into more
of this sort of destination for a social music kind
of platform where you could discover music, you could find
other people who are into the same sort of music
(26:42):
you were in. It was meant to be kind of
the way my Space had originally launched, but with a
very slick redesign. But again, this happened pretty late in
the game, and I don't think like I remember I
went back to my Space to check it out after
this happened, because I was very curious once it was redesigned,
(27:02):
and while I thought it was a slick redesign, I
could find no reason to go back frequently, and so
it would only be if I just happened to think
about it every few months, like I wonder what my
Space looks like now. So they still are a music
and entertainment consumption site. In two thousand fifteen, Specific Media
rebranded to volant Tech Ye, and then the following year,
(27:24):
Volant tech was purchased by Time Incorporated. I love that
one of the articles about this acquisition was Time accidentally
buys my Space. Yes, but it was because multiple things.
One they were buying the overall company, not just my Space. Two.
One of the things that my Space had was still
incredibly valuable, and that was the information about all the
(27:47):
people who had had my Space accounts. Yes, so this
is when I went back to my Space to see
if I could find my old account, which of course
I could not, but they still have all my information
what I put in there, and that know, information is valuable.
Their entire companies that exist just to broker information across
in order to make add deals that kind of stuff.
(28:09):
And so really, when you look at it, the deal
that Time made was not really for my Space necessarily.
It was really for the one billion registered user data base.
That's what it really was about. Now you know, all
this being said, all of this sadness about my Space,
it is something we should note. Facebook as of this recording,
(28:30):
is losing some of its younger user base because technology
it evolves. Yeah. Well, and also you get to a
point where young people who are growing up look at
a social network that seems to have all older people
on it and they want something for themselves, right, They
don't want to go to where all the old people
are hanging out. Which is a large reason why a
(28:53):
lot of the Facebook folks didn't have any interest in
moving over to my Space. That my Space was viewed
as the place where adults in total pervert were hanging
out because of this terrible reputation, so people stuck to Facebook.
And then now you have you know, that was a
decade ago. So now you have a different generation who says, well,
I don't really going to fit moms on Facebook? Do
I want to go to Facebook? Well, and there's this
(29:14):
other thing going on where a lot of the younger
generation doesn't want to put things up that can be
found forever. So you put something on Facebook, you can
change your privacy settings, but largely it's in the inner
space forever unless you go back and delete it. Where's
something like Snapchat at least has the appearance of it deleting,
although that story is more complicated than that. Also, in
(29:35):
the interest of full disclosure, both of us have moms
who are on Facebook. Yes, and also Facebook does have
their story feature, which is similar to Snapchat. You put
something up, it's only there for a brief period of time,
although how long that stays on a server is another question. Yes,
And here are some lessons I like learning that we
can learn from my Space some stuff that that really
(29:56):
kind of sums up the issue with the braink Here.
One is that they found out that focusing on monetization
over user experience is a dangerous thing. And when it
went to the extreme that my Space did, it ends
up hurting the business in the long run. Now, that's
not to say that you can't focus on monetization. Facebook
obviously did and did quite well gradually. Yeah, they kind
(30:19):
of focused on building the social side first and then
the monetization, whereas my Space sort of flipped that. Another
was that the kitchen sink approach to designing and implementing
new features means you're not really going to do anything. Well.
You might end up with a lot of new features,
but you probably didn't make them as good as you
had intended. It's going to be a frustrating experience to
(30:40):
use them, and it may not add anything to the
user experience at least nothing positive at the end of
the way. And so you really need to be picky
and choosy about those features and and maybe ask the
question what do the users actually want? You know, not
all of us can be Steve Jobs, where we come
out and tell you what you want and then you realize, oh,
I do want to yes, So don't try to be
(31:01):
Steve Jobs. If you're not Steve Jobs. Not everybody wants
to go to somebody's profile and have guar blasted at them. Yeah. Also,
by relying on aliases and handles that old style of
the approach to the internet. MySpace made it very hard
to connect with people that you actually knew. Facebook made
it very easy. So this plays into something that's social
(31:23):
networking experts. And when I say social networking, I don't
just mean online social networks, I mean you can just yeah,
it could just be your friends, just your group of
friends right beyond, like computers are not even involved. But
social networking experts say that the Facebook approach allowed for
creating strong triadic closures, which is an interesting concept. The
(31:44):
basic idea of a triadic closure when it comes to
friends is where link gets the sword and no, that's
the try force closure. The triadic closure aerial is when
you see that two people have a friend in common. Right,
Let's say that you and I both have a common friend,
but we don't know each other yet. So ariel you
(32:05):
have this one friend, I have that one friend, and
we're both really close with that one person. The triadic
closure thought experiment goes that people who have very strong
friend connections to a common friend are more likely to
also become friends. Facebook's model works on that principle as well.
Because I'm sure you've had this experience where you visited
(32:29):
a person's profile and you see someone may be active
on that profile. I got that person sounds interesting, and
then over time you start interacting with that person and
you become friends. Right. Um. And also you find out
on Facebook that the world is much smaller than you
thought it was, and you'll find out that people that
you know in totally different circles somehow know each other
and that seems wrong. And then your brain explodes and
(32:51):
you lay on the ground eating ice cream with a
cat laying on your head for hours. Yes, so those
are the lessons we've learned from my space that cats
laying on your head are very good at soothing you,
and they're great therapy. And also just the thought of
being too big to fail is toxic. You cannot take
that philosophy to heart. I mean Facebook is always in
(33:13):
danger of doing that as well. And while Facebook now
is larger than MySpace ever was, it's not to say
that it's always going to be there, you know, it's
a It's a thing that is worth remembering is that
it's always possible there's another social networking site down the line,
or even something totally different that we can't anticipate just
now that will quote unquote take down Facebook the way
(33:36):
Facebook took down my Space. So fascinating story. And if
you ever do a search for worst business acquisitions, the
news Core MySpace one is almost always on that list.
It was just it was not unfortunate, not the most
expensive by any stretch of the imagination. There were bigger
deals that went bad, but it was one that was
(33:58):
just very, very high profile, and it also was one
where a lot of people felt like it would be
difficult to mess it up because my Space was so
far ahead when it was all happening. But there you
can mess it up. Well, I'm glad we were able
to revisit this. I'm sad Tom is no longer my friend.
You know what, I bet he still is, just in
(34:18):
his heart, in his heart, he is still still friends
with my Space people. Well that's sweet of Tom. I
appreciate that, Tom. And until next time, this has been
the Brink and I have been Jonathan Stricklin and I
have been aerial casting. If you would like to learn
more about what we've talked about, as well as keep
(34:39):
track of all of our episodes, make sure you visit
our website at the brink podcast dot show, or you
can email us at feedback at the brink podcast Dot show.
Business on the Brink News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Ariel Kristen Kasten
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