Blog # 3

MySpace.

I am going to talk about the social potato that is MySpace. Now for any of you who don’t know what MySpace is I’ll tell ya!

“ MySpace is a popular social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos internationally.” (http://mashable.com) Well you guessed it; it’s a social media site where you can make friends, share music and videos. Exciting stuff? Yes. But does this all sound familiar to us? Is MySpace in anyway…

·      New?

·      Different?

·      Innovative?

 Not exactly. I’m not quite sure that there is a need for MySpace in today’s new NEW social media world. And in fact I think that MySpace should just be gone all together (harsh, I know) Now I definitely don’t hate MySpace, in some ways it was the gateway to the social media sites that we have today! And for that I’m eternally grateful but I’m not sure if its necessary for MySpace to be around in our 2014 era. Four reasons come to mind when I think of MySpace and why it needs to be obsolete.

·      Number One: There’s an app for that. When MySpace had its Justin Timberlake makeover back in 2012 it was suppose to be innovative, fresh, and exciting, basically the next big thing. You could find videos, listen to music and connect with your favorite artists. This whole  “new MySpace” idea was suppose to be the saving grace of this sad social media site. But to the creators surprise it has not taken off. According to expandedramblings.com there are 36 million current MySpace users (http://expandedramblings.com, Smith) While according to statisticbrain.com there are 1,310,000,000 of monthly active Facebook users (www.statisticbrain.com) Facebook takes the cake, and it will continue taking the cake. There is no denying that Facebook is one of the most popular social media sites and that MySpace won’t ever compare. Facebook has created an untouchable social media kingdom; one that it rules.  In an article on gizmodo.com Sam Biddle wrights “There's too much to do on the New MySpace It's a chintzy web carnival. Spotify-style music streaming, YouTube-style video streaming, pseudo-tweets, a Faux Facebook News Feed, all swirled together. But unlike the services it copies and attempts to blend, there's no clear way to use New MySpace. It goes in too many directions at once. When you sit down in front of it for the first time, you're lost.”(Biddle) Sam hits the nail on the head with this statement. MySpace will never come back because it’s just a cop-out to other social media sites we already have!

·      Number two: Where the heck am I?? The second reason why MySpace should just take its long awaited dirt nap is that it’s to confusing! Social media is all about simplifying our lives, and making things easier, quicker, and more convenient. The new MySpace hasn’t really graced itself with those attributes. It’s confusing to try and get around new MySpace, first off it scrolls sideways which is just an awkward site for your brain to withstand. Along with scrolling sideways it’s difficult to figure out where you are or what to do. “There's a news feed that's sorta like Facebook's, showing you the latest things your friends have done—songs they've played, videos they've watched, musicians they've liked. But it scrolls sideways. And it's jittery. There's a catalog of streaming music—with all major labels onboard—but no coherent way to browse. You can scroll (sideways) through your friends' playlists, but it's a slow, clunky process of wading through giant thumbnails. You can search, but that brings up an artist's catalog, unsorted, with a mish-mash of "related artists" thrown in the mix. The entire audio component is somehow a visual headache.”(Biddle)

·      Number Three: Music sharing gone wrong. The third reason why MySpace should just silence itself is that it bit off more than it could chew. MySpace says to be a bunch of things instead of one main form of social media. It tries to be all forms of social media, which is its downfall, specifically with music sharing. Of of all the things that MySpace claimed to be one of the number one aspects it prided itself on was the fact that it was going to help you connect with your favorite artists and bands. As great as this sounds it’s not all that it is cracked up to be. Instead of artists returning to their old homepages and keeping the fans they already had with the sites old popularity the new “new” MySpace makes you start all over. As Brenden Mulligan states “getting musicians to care at all about MySpace again is a hard enough challenge. Getting them to care enough to try to rebuild a fan base on the platform is out of the question. And that’s what they’re expecting. Every musician starts out in the new MySpace with zero fans. They need to start from scratch. To tell their audience “Go back to MySpace and connect with us!” An example: “Britney Spears has about 1.5 million friends on the old MySpace. She has fewer than 7,000 connections on the new MySpace. Hell, even ever-present well-dressed JT has about 1.5 million friends on the old and 50,000 on the new.ew “New” MySpace makes you start from the beginning…from scratch”(Muligan)

·      Number Four: What is the point? My overall feeling when I think of MySpace or quote on quote “New” MySpace is that it’s a been there done that. All of the attractions that MySpace is trying to obtain have already been obtained, and our working just fine on their own. MySpace is like the 6^th wheel on a date when compared to Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, Pandora and YouTube. If they wanted to catch America’s attention they should have done it in another way. “The sad thing is that the New MySpace is just not fun to use. There's no reason to use it anyway. It's a cobbling-together things that don't belong together but have been roped into being neighbors. Is it a social network? Not really, and if so, it's a bad one. Is it a music discovery service? Maybe, but it's like looking into the wrong end of a telescope. Is it a photo sharing site? Haha, no. Is it Twitt—no. And yet it resembles these things.”(Biddle)

So that is my two cents when it comes to MySpace. Some social media just can’t come back. I used the “MySpace squandered the only thing it had left” article which is written by Brenden Mulligan here’s the link http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/02/myspace-squandered-the-only-thing-it-had-left/ and I also used Sam Biddle’s article titled “The New MySpace review: Just Die Already” here’s the link http://gizmodo.com/5965926/the-new-myspace-review-just-die-already

Cited Sources:

"Mashable." Mashable. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Apr. 2014.

Mulligan, Brenden. "MySpace Squandered the Only Thing It Had Left." TechCrunch. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Apr. 2014

Biddle, Sam. "The New MySpace Review: Just Die Already." Gizmodo. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Apr. 2014.

Smith, Craig. "DMR." DMR. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Apr. 2014.

"Facebook Statistics." Statistic Brain RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Apr. 2014.