New Comm Biz

It’s no secret that MySpace has been loosing market share to Facebook for a while now. MySpace is ugly and spammy.

The ability to design your own MySpace theme has proven that most people have zero design skills (my self included). The ads are obnoxious and intrusive.

Most early adopters have long ago switched from MySpace to Facebook. Facebook is cleaner and the ads *usually* aren’t as annoying.

I still have my MySpace page, mostly for nostalgic reasons. When I owned the skate shop in Vegas it was the single best marketing tool I had. I don’t use it to keep up with people anymore. The only thing I do still use it for is discovering and following bands, but even that is limited.

I opened my email this weekend and saw this message from MySpace, inviting me to connect with my old classmates. At first I couldn’t decide if they were trying to compete with Classmates.com of Facebook. I’m pretty sure they’re trying to compete with Facebook.

Clicking through the ad takes you to schools.myspace.com. Which encourages you to search for fellow students from your old school. This is obviously one of the biggest fascinations with social networks. We all want to know what happened to our ex’s. We all want to know who went on to great things and who didn’t (if we’re honest with ourselves we’re probably more interested in finding out who didn’t).

They also have a list of *top* high schools and colleges. Top doesn’t mean best it only means which schools have the most members. Searching for my high school, Boise High School only yielded 3622 members. 1173 current students and 2413 alumni. You could then search by age. At first I thought it was a pretty cool feature. Then I realized how creepy this could be.

Overall I think this move on MySpace’s part was neccessary but honestly is just too little too late. The real value in MySpace moving forward is around entertainment. I think they should focus on giving indie bands more robust tools. Afterall it was bands that made MySpace viable and pulled users away from Friendster.

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