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Rip MySpace: What Went Wrong For Tom?
Cast your mind back before the days of Twitter and Facebook, back to the days where everyone raced home to check their MySpace profile. During its heyday, MySpace was the ‘it’ site which had over 200 million users at its peak. However after the arrival of Facebook, MySpace usage started to significantly decrease leading to the site having to cut 30% of its employees in 2009, but how did the once popular site become a thing of the past? With MySpace now being connected with whiny blogs, fake accounts and photo albums full of pouts and poses, can the site ever regain its reputation and entice users back from Facebook?
One of the key reasons why MySpace usage started to decline is the amount of negative publicity that it started to gather. The site has faced a barrage of media reports that portray it as a dangerous place for younger users that post personal information for the world to see. Although the site boosted its security and public relations efforts, the damage was apparent when it was announced that 90,000 sex offenders were identified and removed from the site.
Another reason for the big MySpace fail is that it made things just a bit too complicated. Unlike Facebook, MySpace allowed the user to design the look of their profile with thousands of potential stock designs to choose from along with the option for you to create your own design from scratch. Even simple features such as writing blogs, sharing pictures and uploading videos required users to input basic html code. With so much going on it is no surprise that the simplicity of Facebook was such a lure for MySpace users.
Although sites such as Facebook and Twitter are still riding the wave of success, there is no guarantee that they will not suffer the same fate as their predecessor as technology develops. With so many updates and apps available for both Facebook and Twitter it does seem that they have a long way to go before they face the same decline as MySpace but who knows, maybe one day they too will be a thing of the past.