Tag Archives: myspace

Rebooted MySpace is what Ping Should’ve Been

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Coming from a small business owner in humble Cleveland, Ohio, the strategic guidance I might give Steve Jobs on his (sad) attempt at building a walled garden social network would be this: sometime it’s better to join than fight. If Apple can’t get its mits on Facebook, it should seriously consider taking over MySpace from News Corp.  In fact, News Corp. has already outed the price tag at $300,000,000, though I think that by the time any potential deal might be struck, that price may come down.  The Facebook train just shifted into fifth gear, after all.

Once upon a time, iTunes had the opportunity to become “indyTunes“, and totally missed the boat.  Right now, MySpace is the MP3.com of the 2.0 era, offering indies more than Apple does in terms of self-service distribution and exposure.  With this rebooted MySpace, a very immersive, very commercialized, very polished experience is in order.  Same idea as iTunes, except that iTunes isn’t nearly as immersive as it could be. Problem one is DRM, which has stimied iTunes’ ability to become totally web-based.  Problem two is Steve, who wants so much control over the ecosystem that he’s not likely, in my opinion, to expand Ping to the wild wild web.

That said, I still think MySpace’s new look rock concert skin is just the veil for the real goods: an audience for Ping.  If Apple wants in on that action, they’re going to have to pick sides, and if Facebook is as snot-nosed as I’ve read regarding Steve, then MySpace might be ripe for the picking.

10 Truths Revealed by the MySpace/Microsoft Teamup

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In honor of MyCrosoft.

1 – Microsoft lost big when it walked away empty-handed from Facebook, and Redmond’s been regretting it ever since.

2- Microsoft’s unexciting efforts in the music-business, including the Zune, may now have renewed hope, as MySpace is probably the only real 2.0 music destination on the web (iTunes is hardly a 2.0 destination; nice try Apple fans).

3 – Silverlight sucks and nobody wants it except Redmond.  Those page takeover ads for the next Batman movie that you see on MySpace occur courtesy of Flash, not Silverlight.  Of course, this won’t change that, either.

4 – MySpace is desperate to clean up its image as the red light district of social networking.  Who better than squeaky-clean Microsoft to bring a little much-needed legitimacy to the table?

5 – There are a greater percentage of Mac users on Facebook than on MySpace.  OK, I’m guessing here. But I bet there’s a pretty Mac-favorable ratio on the Facebook side that doesn’t exist on MySpace.

6 – Windows Mobile is late to the social networking party, and not fashionably so.  Hey, wait, what party ISN’T Windows Mobile late to?

7 – Microsoft would consider making an offer for MySpace, if it weren’t for the horrible fact that MySpace is the world’s largest ColdFusion abuser.  Eek, that’ll scare off a .Net dev in a hurry.

8 – MySpace’s Hold ‘Em poker apps are better than Facebook’s.  (It’s true.)

9 – Microsoft holds in very high regard the design ethic of MySpace (which looks like a 1998-era web site and always causes people to wonder where in the hell the link to edit a photo album is).

10 – MySpace still garners some undeniable clout, even if it’s with a segment of consumers that are less likely to have graduated college and more likely to still be rocking a Pentium 3.

EventBox totally rocks

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I saw Luca’s tweet about EventBox, and he’s absolutely right.  This program is super cool.  It’s for managing tweets, rss updates, facebook updates, etc etc all in one place.  So far I’m loving it. Growl notifications for updates, heads-up display.  Really cool.  Grab a copy yourself if you’re running OS X 10.5 and let me know how you like it.

Achieving Ubiquity with Social Networks

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If Facebook wants to be the king of hill, they’re going about it the wrong way. The number of useless apps that cram my Facebook feeds with useless “top friend invites” and “super hugs” is just too much. Those of us who would prefer a more serious social network tool would prefer the closed, no-frills approach of something like a LinkedIn, which doesn’t allow “apps” to be added, and tries valiantly to keep nuisances to a minimum.

Still, LinkedIn is for business-oriented users, and will never have the flexibility or wide-audience draw required to make a ubiquitous, dominant social network. People go to LinkedIn because because of its tight focus, and, in many cases, that’s why people avoid LinkedIn as well.  And in the end, tools like LinkedIn won’t suffice to help salespeople, because it’s mostly sales people than inhabit its garden (let’s face it).

Buying and selling aside, I’ve been doing a ton of thinking about social networking lately, because I was charged with creating a social network for a company in the media business. This social network is geared around a specific pastime of American culture–a vertical subject area too narrow for a Facebook to be excellent at.  What’s more, this social network wouldn’t be a good extension of a large publisher or broadcaster already involved in this pastime, because traditional media is bent on subcription fees and a lack of openness that discourages adoption.

So there’s a specific role for culture-driven social networks, things geared around video (like YouTube), sports, and music, though none of these verticals has been dominated by a single player, except for video probably. What’s needed is a social network infrastructure that allows many enrollment-based sites to be used with a common access credential–that’s right, a single sign-on for many social networks.

Google’ OpenSocial offers some of this thinking, but adoption has been laggard. Another example is Gravitars, which allow a common avatar picture across many blogs. Gravatars is supported by WordPress and Typepad, among others.

The challenge to seeing a single sign-on implemented across the medium is that the players who are big enough to make it happen (Facebook and MySpace, make no mistake) won’t do it, because they’ve gone into revenue-sucking mode.  So time will tell.

Cell-phones, not PCs, ARE the user conduits for social networks

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Well over a year ago, I wrote in this post:

Cell phones are going to become the dominant means of social networking. They’re already the best tool for it and the only reason PCs are dominant in the social net arena is because PCs have always been OPEN ENOUGH to participate social nets in a meaningful way. Cell phones haven’t been. Today I’m thinking about the nexus of mobility, identity management, and social networking.

So my point then was the, eventually, when a cell phone with enough functionality and usability finally shows up, users at large will fall into preferring cell phones over PCs for social networking over the web.  This is a point that didn’t get enough attention until iPhone 2.0 showed up last Friday. Now, it seems the web is abuzz about the potential of cell phones and social networks. Here’s a snippet from ZDNet’s Jennifer Leggio:

Think about it. Two of the big iPhone application announcements centered on location-based social networking sites Loopt and Whrrl. Both allow users to determine the locations of their friends and both provide microblogging and hyperlocal reviews, all using a GPS-powered application.

Jennifer goes on to say that social giants MySpace and Facebook have an advantage over upstarts like Loopt and Whrrl because, well they’re already giants. Touche. But MySpace is an incredibly stupid company with an incredibly poor base of core technology.  So, if social nets on cell phones are going to thrive in a lasting, meaningful way, my money’s on Facebook.

Sightspeed Lite Widget for MySpace

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Probably the first prominent A/V communications add-on for MySpace (and maybe the only significant MySpace “App” to date), Sightspeed is now offering a videoconferencing plugin that you can park in your MySpace page. Due to MySpace’s ColdFusion-polluted legacy-paralyzed architecture, however, you won’t be able to control WHERE it appears on your page. Check it out here.

Gizmo’s “support” of MySpace leaves a lot to be desired

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Hats off to Gizmo Project. Gizmo5 lets me IM on four different networks from my mobile, with a unified buddy list and a consistent conversation view across all networks. Awesome. But the big to-do about MySpace support last week is really not that big a deal, now that I’ve actually tried it.

The way it works, the Gizmo backend server uses IM to collect your Myspace account information and then logs into your account, parses information out of your profile, and sends you text-based alerts when that information changes. Yeah, really–that’s about ALL there is to it. Oh, and it will forward MySpace IM messages to and from your phone. But you can’t browse your MySpace buddy list unless you want to send texts back and forth to the IM-based “agent” they’ve built.
Not exactly the kind of interactivity I was hoping for. Let’s hope version 2 is more fruitful.