... Well, after Myspace fell, Facebook slowly became the new Myspace (not "The New Myspace"). Facebook now has issues with paedophiles, security issues, and a problem with advertisements (both for publishers and for the users viewing them)
I remember back in 2007 and 08 when people were abandoning their facebook accounts. There was almost a cloud of smugness from the facebook users promoting how much better it was than myspace. But I remember even by 2008 it was pretty obvious that most of the reasons facebook users were saying made myspace so bad, were already happening on facebook as well.
Part of what went wrong with myspace was when it got sold to newscorp. (and BTW to whoever said Tom sold it... Tom was just the "Vanna White" of myspace, he wasn't a controlling interest.) The corporate news media really had no idea of how to fit their business model onto the internet, (most of them are still trying to figure that out) and so Murdoch really had very little understanding of how social networking sites really worked. When they saw users leaving en masse for facebook they panicked and tried making the myspace platform more like facebooks.
That was the biggest mistake they made. They might as well have just sent out a mass message to all there users telling them they agreed that facebook was better. Kinda like when CocaCola changed there recipe because the Pepsi taste test campaign had been so successful for Pepsi.
One of the big criticisms about myspace by webdesign critics was the ugly page designs. When everyone shifted to facebook, the new myspace team jumped on that as the culprit of their problem. It was easy to latch onto because it's one of the things facebook was saying was better about their site. Unfortunately the ability for users to redesign their own pages (as hideous as most of them were) was the one thing myspace had going for it that facebook didn't. The critics of those pages were basing that criticism on principles of good web page design, but myspace pages were never really web pages in the normal sense. Those pages were more like scrapbooks. Anyone that has ever been involved with or known anyone that is into scrapbooking could recognise that immediately.
That aspect of myspace had been created entirely by the userbase. It only happened because there had been a lot of sloppy code made while the programmers tried getting myspace online when it first started. Basically it was an accident, when the first users started adding code to change the divs and tables the original myspace team recognized it as a bug and was making plans to correct it. Had they done so then myspace would have been a lot more like what facebook eventually created right from the start. But the management team decided instead that if the users liked it then it could help get more users.
Had the management team under newscorp understood what the problems really were they should have fought back by promoting the creative outlet that myspace gave it's members that facebook didn't. They should have identified the fact that as facebook was becoming popular it was starting to have the same problems with spam, paedophiles, security issues. Had they identified those real problems and worked harder at addressing them on myspace, and at the same time waged a campaign pointing out how the spam, phishing, pedos, and all those type problems were happening on facebook as well. And then promoted the scrapbooking features of myspace as something better than facebook. Instead they let facebook keep the false reputation of being a safer site and they made the fatal mistake of agreeing that the one thing myspace had that set them apart actually was the negative feature that facebook said it was.
Myspace made the same mistake CocaCola had with Pepsi in the cola wars. They let facebook control the debate and because of that mistake, myspace lost the social networking war.
