[LINK] "The rise and fall of MySpace"

[rfmcdonald]

The Financial Times's Matthew Garrahan profiles MySpace's decline from social networking hegemon to increasingly sickly competitor for market share. The cause? According to Garrahan, the ignorance of News Corp's Rupert Murdoch of the Internet, clashes between an unprofessional culture at MySpace and demanding News Corp people, and a fatal failure to actually innovate (blame it on both sides, since they're blaming each other). Garrahan ends with a note of skepticism about plans to use the strong MySpace sense of communtity and strength in music and video to relaunch the platform, since these plans have apparently been afoot for a while. Besides, as I've blogged several times (1, 2, 3), many of MySpace's core demographics have already defected to Facebook, and the ones that remain aren't necessarily very attractive. MySpace isn't going to disappear, it has its own core user population, but it has lost to Facebook.