Written by william | May 24, 2010 03:06 AM
Seems like everyone I know has decided that MySpace is irrelevant; maybe even worse I think it’s become uncool. It’s really interesting to me how quickly this has happened. It seemed like MySpace was still indispensable to many folks as recently as a year or two ago but some things have definitely changed recently.
I was having a conversation with Lou the other day about this and he suggested that many artists were primarily using their MySpace page to enable fans and other folks to hear their music and he commented that the existence of several other players (including some excellent ones by SoundCloud) has made this use of MySpace less essential. Add to that the arrival of new services like Twitter plus increasing adoption of Facebook and most of the online social networking has also drifted steadily away from MySpace. Given this environment and the batch of recent press about their leadership changes, attempts to refocus on music and building better software and then recent privacy concerns and various skeptical articles about their future you would think they’d be trying to make themselves look good right now.
This was what I was thinking about when I heard that they are trying to build a better mobile strategy and support Android developers (ulterior motive: I was hoping there might be some good APIs made available that we could use to do some interesting things). Unfortunately it turns out that the feature set they are providing is pretty lame. I guess this is not really unexpected from them, but it certainly doesn’t line up with all their recent rhetoric about how they are turning things around. Overall I thought it was fairly disappointing, but in a way that is becoming more and more typical for them. Certainly when you compare this to SoundCloud’s work the difference in quality is fairly obvious.
They probably aren’t going anywhere any time soon, but I think you have to interpret news like this as a sign of their steadily increasing irrelevance. The window must be closing and I think I am starting to believe they are going to go away.
What do you think? And, more interestingly, what features of MySpace will you miss most if they do go away?