Myspace became the most popular social networking site in the United States in June 2006 and it stayed that way until April of 2008. Myspace was beat out by its main competitor, Facebook, based on monthly visitors April 19, 2008 on the Alexa List of Top Sites in 2008. Since the drastic fall of Myspace, the website continues to lose members to Facebook.
In the beginning, Myspace was created as a mimic of the social-networking site Friendster. After the 2002 launch of Friendster.com, eUniverse employees [the creators of MySpace] saw the potential of social networking sites on the web and wanted to make their own.
By August of 2003, Myspace was an offical website. It took ten days to launch the site. The very first Myspace users were eUniverse employees. The eUniverse’s subscribers and users were told about Myspace, and a lot of them joined.
As quickly as MySpace became number one, it dropped from the number one spot. On April 19, 2008, Facebook was ranked over MySpace as the king of social networking sites. The site has been gradually falling since. But why?
“Myspace became too crowded. The site was slow, and there were too many ads on the page,” said Ellen Farkas, junior. “Anytime I got on the site, it took forever to load. There were ads all over my profile,” added Michael Hopkins
Myspace’s security didn’t protect users computers.
“I had to make at least 3 different Myspace pages because every account I had was hacked,” said Kaitlyn King, sophomore.
“Industry experts have warned that MySpace is a ‘hotbed’ for spyware and other malicious programs that can infect your computer,” said an article written by Jefferson on http://www.who-sucks.com.
Former Myspace users thought the website wasn’t good looking. Gabriel Ingram, senior, said, “When people super edited their profiles, they were, like, so ugly.”
Many people on MySpace edited their profile codes to suit them– but a lot of them didn’t know what they were doing. “There were all these third party sites that would ‘help you’,” Ingram continued, “and they just covered your profile in stupid stuff.”
Their music features don’t match up to other online sites. When asked if she ever used the MySpace Music feature, Keely Mckinley, junior, said, “I don’t think I ever did. There were other websites that provided more music.” MySpace tries to push its music business on its users, but it doesn’t match up to Itunes, Playlist.com, Pandora, or Grooveshark.com.
Let’s face it – Myspace had flaws. These problems pushed the users away to find another site; Facebook was there to pick up the pieces.
There is a possibility of a bright future for Myspace. Justin Timberlake bought a share of Myspace from News Corp. With Timberlake’s new help, the buyers hope to transform Myspace.
“There’s a need for a place where fans can go to interact with their favorite entertainers, listen to music, watch videos, share and discover cool stuff and just connect. MySpace has the potential to be that place,” Timberlake said in a statement.
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