Future of MySpace #2

This is in conjunction with a post I wrote a couple months ago. Apparently, Mashable and I, are still trying to figure it out.

So here’s what I know after reading (finally, it’s been in my “pile to read” for a 2 months now) their article.

MySpace has a “new overarching goal of promoting user discovery and self-expression.” – Sounds promising. With all of the creativity and content generation we have flying back and forth between consumers and brands now, doesn’t it make a little sense that there be an SNS for artists themselves? People who actually seek to express themselves through content?

In October of last year, MySpace had launched an Artist Dashboard tool with the promise of making it available for normal users as well. “Imagine being able to get statistics back on what your most popular shares are, who is reacting to what you’re publishing and where they are.” This is information/metadata that Facebook only provides to Pages. What if you could find this about your personal content shares? A new step in the evolving transparency and conversation around information sharing.

And, get this, “a new ‘Liking’ mechanism will emerge in the future as one part of a system that will start to understand more about you.” Hmmm, did Facebook steal MySpace’s future? With their new “Like” social plugin recently popping up all over the place (I love the Huffington Post’s Social features BTW), will MySpace proceed with their plans? MySpace says their liking mechanism will start to “build preferences that ultimately are going to build up who you are in our database so we can deliver you better experiences” which means better, more relevant content. This IS the future. Anybody working in social media knows it. If MySpace gets this right, will they have succeeded more effectively than Facebook?

And I love what they call “interest maps” – what is to become a personalization engine. “Discovery has to be wider than what you think you want.” Awesome.

New Topic Pages pull content in from Twitter, YouTube, the web based on what’s happening surrounding a particular topic, movie, celebrity, etc. This idea reminds me of Facebook’s new Community Pages. Are the SNS teams trading ideas? OR is the social universe and the giants who run it running out of good ones? Stay tuned.

One things for sure, MySpace does not do a good job of generating its own content. Google any one of the terms that Mashable has so kindly reported on and that I have used to create this article and you’ll get…nothing, of relevance. Facebook has done an absolutely fabulous job of challenging Google for search engine results. With their numerous blogs, insider groups, and media affiliations, Facebook knows how to own the web while MySpace struggles for a headline.

For those of you who still have an active profile (I saw the loss of probably 40 friends who have since deleted their MySpace accounts and left for Facebook), do you think MySpace has been resurrected? What changes have you noticed? What niche does it fulfill?

I have changed my MySpace theme but that’s about it. I will be logging in more frequently now to see what else has changed. See you in the future…in a space that is…myne.

Future of MySpace

How many of you are asking yourselves this very question? You want to know if you should recommend MySpace (as a social media) to a client or at least have back up support if you don’t think it’s where they should be spending there social media budget. Besides the obvious, that Facebook has clearly taken the lead in terms of SNS, is there a future of MySpace? Let’s see.

Collecta – is the latest real-time search engine to come into existence, and what space can their algorthims search through? MySpace! This means we can now get real-time data on MySpace users – what they’re sharing – their mood, photos, videos, blog posts, and status updates – all things that current social media services are trying to aggregate across a multitude of platforms, but that are hard to focus on a particular user group. So the second part of Collecta’s success will be to give us MySpace user demographics so that brands can allocate their social media budgets efficiently.

MySpace vs. Twitter – An interesting article from VentureBeat talks about the differences in status updates on MySpace vs. Twitter. It’s in these differences that may indicate who and what MySpace works for. So let’s take a look:

• Twitter users exchange more interesting links with each other – this possibly signifies that Twitter users are higher income, better educated, have more technology (iPhone, iPod, laptop, etc.) in their lives, probably are on at least 5 different social networks, and can hold good conversations because they’re opinionated. They are connectors – the people you want to reach early on the product adoption curve.
• MySpace users like to share more media – music, photos, videos – this could be huge support for their ambitious endeavor to become “a place for music.”
• The conversations via “updates” (and Tweets) seem to contain a lot more contextual fodder on Twitter than they do on Myspace, where the updates are much more simplistic and topic focuses. This could possibly tell us that people on MySpace aren’t that involved with other social media spaces, as much as they are with just MySpace, therefore their conversations aren’t that in-depth (are they even conversations?)

MySpace fans consider the site their OWN PERSONAL WEBSITE – This from a Helium user (no date included): “MySpace is in effect YOUR space – you can change the background, add music to your profile which plays whenever someone opens your page, tweak the layout, and so on. With Facebook, all you get is a standard plain-background profile, some stats about yourself and the applications you’ve added… and it is the same for everyone. No fanfare when guests come in to view your page, no grand introduction, no uniqueness (besides yourself as a real person)… nothing fancy. I find that on MySpace, you can show off your personality as much as you are willing to. It is like having a free personal website.”

And a couple more random notes:

• MySpace seems to be more for meeting people, where Facebook is for keeping in touch with people you may already know. (what do YOU think?)
• A friend of mine said that MySpace seems to be the SNS for more Hispanics and African-Americans…would YOU agree or disagree?
• If you Search Twitter for the word “MySpace” you’ll get a good share of Tweets that are in a language other than English, could this mean that MySpace could have its future in another country than the Facebook-dominated U.S.?

So in conclusion, it’s in-conclusive. Sorry! I will definitely be watching the space this year…so check back here or at my blog for more of the MySpace Case.

Happy New Year!