Or How I’d Save MySpace

But Brian, MySpace isn’t dead, why does it need saving? Hah! What’s that expression, you’re dead you just don’t know it yet. Well MySpace isn’t dead just yet, but its got the path and the symptoms of a dying site. MySpace has a number of problems that befell another famous social network 4 years ago that has only recently resuscitated as a mere shadow of what it could have been (Friendster in case you were wondering, the O.G. of social networks).

So let’s outline what MySpace’s problems are:

· Traffic is flat or down

· Engagement is way down

· Growth is gone

· Costs are still super high

· No smart way to monetize

· Marketers are losing interest

· Developers are losing interest

So some of these issues are harder to address than others, and MySpace has been making strides to cut costs (slashing most of their staff) before the Google Ad deal runs out (thereby decimating their revenue). MySpace has been diametrically opposite of facebook from a product standpoint from day one. Facebook for being such a large group of people, innovates faster than any other startup out there. MySpace on the other hand takes AGES to roll out improvements, and when they do, no one knows about them.

Step 1 - Stop insulting your users just to boost your pageviews
If your CPM on your pageviews is still hovering below $0.50 as it had in the past then its really unprofitable to keep all that remnant super low response rate pageviews. Move items throughout the site that don’t need a separate page load into on page AJAX calls. Save us some time, and improve your site’s usability at the same time. Your users aren’t as dumb as you assume they are.

Step 2 - Build small and build fast
Your platform is years behind facebook’s so you need to start over and build it for engagement and as an enhancement to the user’s experience. Right now its tacked on as though it was an afterthought, rethink it, and don’t be afraid to learn from facebook or twitter. Reorganize your team into small groups that can build out new features fast, and forget the giant projects. Facebook’s photos team is 6 people, they built an app that houses more photos than any other site out there. 6 people.

Step 3 - Focus on your core competencies
MySpace was the defacto place for celebrities and music at one point. That’s being lost to twitter and facebook because they are providing better tools for their users. Myspace had the opportunity to become the defacto clearing house for music on the web outside of iTunes, but yet it dropped the ball. Why not build what pandora and last.fm wished they could?

Step4 - Out innovate on the user experience
MySpace has allowed itself to become the next friendster which failed mostly due to a lack of a solid user experience. Take this opportunity to build better communication tools, to build more forms of self expression into your platform, and to forge stronger relations for your users social graph.

So these might just be oversimplifying their problems, but sometimes you need to look at their issues from a basic level. Let’s hope for their sake MySpace manages to come up with something.

My completely speculative theory on the social operating system.

There is a battle for control of the next generation of the internet, and this revolves around my thesis that the current phase in the evolution of the web involves the connecting of people.  The battle is being waged by google, facebook, myspace, and a littany of others all vying for this control.

How we got to this point.
The first phase of this battle was about amassing as many users as possible as fast as possible. These users are your asset, they make your network exponentially more valuable. Facebook’s 70 million users are creating billions of unique connections, these connections each hold an intrinsic value in the grand scheme.   So they gave us developers a platform, a platform which is mutually beneficial.  This platform enabled them to double their user base, and at the same time offered the developers a simple way to tap that large and growing user base. 

So while facebook was giving us apps on their own, google was getting all the networks together to build their graph for them.  Google has seen this change coming for years. YEARS. They saw the evolution in social behaviors affecting the internet long before us common folk saw it. They just didn’t have the accounts to leverage it all (orkut has yet to take off here, and gmail isn’t massive enough in reach yet either), so they went to the 3-10th place networks and proposed a deal, that deal was OpenSocial.

There is an important thing to remember when it comes to these companies, they may give you something for free, but they are really making something from your data, so don’t feel bad for them.

What the next phase is:
Controlling the relationships and blowing them out to the entire web. Thats the central thesis behind the google friend connect, and the enabling of ajax api functionalities on facebook (that and the facebook friend connect thing too).  Once you amass enough users, and then tell the thousands of individual sites out there they can plugin your tool and become part of your network, you will have a massive amount of control over managing that network.

For those of you that have been following the teasers of Facebook’s redesign, the one coming july 15th, you might have noticed the shift to make it more like a desktop operating system interface (menu bar, footer/dock).  This is analagous to the concept they are working on to spread throughout the web. Why wouldn’t you install the facebook toolbar on your website if you could quickly and easily enable social relationships on a massive scale?  The quality of these relationships is important too, and that is where facebook has been trying to leverage its position as the social operating system. The Windows or OS X of your relationships.

So what can we expect?
Smart sites will foster this and try and grow with the two platforms, it won’t be easy, but they will be spectacularly worthwhile. Sites that don’t embrace it out of either fear or lack of technical knowledge will miss out while the smaller sites quickly grow past them. The sites that embrace these social levers will see the types of growth we saw on the initial facebook platform applications, but with the flexibility to grow their own loyal bases.

We will also start to see more emergence of open social graph standards spreading around like DiSO and others. Assuming developers can make these things idiot-proof, you’ll be able to move to any site and tap into your relationships wherever possible. The key there will be making them seamless to the user.

Ultimately this represents a major shift in how we design sites and develop their underlying concepts. The social “network” has become a feature or a commodity.

15 minutes ago Myspace pulled the wraps off of their developer platform website. Apparently they eschewed the conventions previously set forth by Bebo and Facebook and are letting everyone in. Its a free for all folks!

Basics:

• Built on a combination of opensocial and myspace “Action Scripts”
• Myspace is hosting the apps (for now)
• You can run advertising on your canvas pages
• You have to apply for developer credentials
• You also have to submit your app for approval.
• Uses a REST API

So happy hacking folks. We’ll post more later as we get to play around with it. But this could be an exciting new platform to develop on.

If you’re looking at the landscape for social networks, social media, and are feeling a bit overwhelmed, don’t be worried, its easy to get lost in the mess.

First thing first, decide what countries/regions you want to grow in. You might be thinking, but Brian, why would I care to look anywhere other than english speaking regions? Well first off, you’d be missing out on billions of potential users, and you’d be missing an opportunity to beat out your competitors to these regions.

So here are my targets for each market worldwide:

• North America
  • MySpace (200 Million users, 65Million+ in US - supposedly)
  • Facebook (55Mil, 30Mil in the US)
  • LinkedIn
  • Bebo
• South America/Latin America
  • Facebook
  • Hi5
  • Orkut
  • Myspace
• Europe
  • Bebo
  • Myspace
  • Facebook
  • Netlog
  • Hi5
• Asia
  • Orkut (India - wow)
  • Facebook
  • Myspace
  • Hi5
  • Friendster (whaaat?)
  • Netlog (Middle east, turkey, that region)
• Africa
  • Honestly don’t know. South Africa and Egypt are the only two viable markets to target, so I’d bet on Facebook.

You might be thinking, but Brian, where do you get this data? Well most of it is from trends I observe, and from my vast network of connections around the globe. I follow where these people are socializing. I know a lot of people in South America, and I hear them talking about Facebook alot now, so thats why I give FB a big 2008 in Latin America. Over a million users are on FB in Latin America right now according to Facebook’s Social Ads.

In a later post I’ll outline how to approach each of these markets, as each is as different culturally online as they are offline.