WEBVTT - No Place for MySpace 0:00:04.320 --> 0:00:08.039 My Space where friend zone was a good thing. Founded 0:00:08.039 --> 0:00:10.520 in two thousand three, this social media outlet was a 0:00:10.600 --> 0:00:12.960 leader in its arena, defining much of what we know 0:00:13.039 --> 0:00:17.200 about social media today. But despite everyone having a mutual 0:00:17.280 --> 0:00:20.240 friend and Tom, in two thousand eight, a bunch of 0:00:20.400 --> 0:00:23.960 four business decisions and lack of competitive edge would make 0:00:24.000 --> 0:00:28.760 them lose a lot of friends and followers to Facebook, 0:00:29.080 --> 0:00:31.560 but my Space continued to cling on like that quiet 0:00:31.640 --> 0:00:34.480 childhood classmate or that weird cousin you keep in touch 0:00:34.520 --> 0:00:38.559 with just out of obligation. So let's poke around and 0:00:38.640 --> 0:00:42.280 share the secrets of what took this social media platform 0:00:42.320 --> 0:00:46.000 out of the friend zone and into a forgotten link. 0:00:46.479 --> 0:01:00.000 This is my Space on the Brink. Hi, I'm Jonathan 0:01:00.000 --> 0:01:02.720 Strictly and I'm Aerial Casting, and you're listening to the 0:01:02.760 --> 0:01:08.399 Brink where we are exploring the almost forgotten website my Space. 0:01:08.400 --> 0:01:10.800 I mean it still exists, like we said, yeah, But 0:01:10.840 --> 0:01:13.080 I mean I think there are people who might be 0:01:13.120 --> 0:01:15.920 listening to this podcast right now who are like, what 0:01:16.000 --> 0:01:18.320 is what is my Space? Or I've heard of that, 0:01:18.360 --> 0:01:23.080 but I've never seen it. So interest of full disclosure, 0:01:23.440 --> 0:01:26.000 Ariel and I both at least once upon a time 0:01:26.080 --> 0:01:29.520 had active MySpace accounts. Yes, I think I maybe added 0:01:29.560 --> 0:01:32.200 two things to mine. I was a desperate clinger to 0:01:32.360 --> 0:01:35.640 live journal prior to joining Facebook, but I kind of 0:01:36.080 --> 0:01:38.800 made an almost direct link I had in my Space, 0:01:38.840 --> 0:01:41.920 but I didn't utilize it. I used my Space quite 0:01:41.959 --> 0:01:45.560 a bit for a while, and I clung to it 0:01:45.640 --> 0:01:48.960 for a while. I actually had a MySpace profile, and 0:01:49.320 --> 0:01:53.080 when when Facebook finally opened up and allowed old people 0:01:53.160 --> 0:01:56.320 like me who were no longer college students to finally join, 0:01:56.960 --> 0:02:01.080 I maintain both and MySpace and a Facebook file. But 0:02:01.920 --> 0:02:04.560 they did fall off the brink. I would argue, like 0:02:04.600 --> 0:02:10.040 the value of that company plummeted to a ridiculous amount. 0:02:10.040 --> 0:02:12.720 When you look at how much it was valued at 0:02:12.720 --> 0:02:15.680 its peak versus how much it was last sold for. 0:02:16.280 --> 0:02:20.160 It was a phenomenal difference. But like we said, they 0:02:20.160 --> 0:02:23.640 didn't completely go away, so they just fell into obscurity. Yeah, 0:02:23.639 --> 0:02:25.800 so it's not like this is one of those stories 0:02:26.200 --> 0:02:29.519 where you have a company that has gone into say bankruptcy, 0:02:29.560 --> 0:02:32.600 and just sort of faded out. Even our Toys or 0:02:32.680 --> 0:02:35.920 Us story, we talked about how that company seemingly was 0:02:36.080 --> 0:02:39.720 gone for good and then now there's a an effort 0:02:39.720 --> 0:02:42.720 to sort of resurrect the brand. My Space never quite 0:02:42.760 --> 0:02:47.320 went to fully dead. It's only mostly dead. Yeah, So 0:02:47.360 --> 0:02:49.680 let's talk a little bit about history before we get 0:02:49.720 --> 0:02:53.160 into what happened. Sure. So my Space was founded in 0:02:53.200 --> 0:02:55.799 two thousand three, as we said in the intro, by 0:02:55.880 --> 0:02:59.920 Christy Wolfe and Tom Anderson. Tom Anderson being your friend 0:03:00.040 --> 0:03:03.000 to Tom. When you get joined, everybody gets a friend 0:03:03.320 --> 0:03:06.640 with Tom, or did. At least in the beginning, they 0:03:06.680 --> 0:03:09.400 weren't actually a social media site. There were an e 0:03:09.560 --> 0:03:12.480 marketing site called the Universe and they sold things like 0:03:12.560 --> 0:03:15.560 diet pills and stuff you might google to see is 0:03:15.600 --> 0:03:19.480 this actually legit? Yeah, And they were looking around at 0:03:19.560 --> 0:03:22.040 some of the other sites that were starting to get popularity, 0:03:22.120 --> 0:03:25.000 and we could even do an episode on this social 0:03:25.240 --> 0:03:27.600 media platform. At some point, they were looking at a 0:03:27.639 --> 0:03:30.239 thing that was called Friendster. Now, did you have a 0:03:30.240 --> 0:03:32.960 friends Stair account? I did not. Friendster was one of 0:03:32.960 --> 0:03:35.840 those things that came and went before I ever. I 0:03:35.880 --> 0:03:37.960 think maybe I checked it out once or twice, but 0:03:38.000 --> 0:03:40.880 I never made an event uh profile for it. There 0:03:40.920 --> 0:03:43.720 are a couple of social media sites that fall into 0:03:43.800 --> 0:03:47.840 that category. But they looked at Friendster. It was a 0:03:47.880 --> 0:03:50.360 popular site. They saw that there was a lot of 0:03:50.400 --> 0:03:54.120 what we would now call engagement, and they thought, we 0:03:54.160 --> 0:03:57.160 want to see that kind of activity on what we're 0:03:57.160 --> 0:03:59.680 working on. How can we do that? Yeah, Yeah, so 0:03:59.720 --> 0:04:03.040 they've basically just copied it. So that turned out to 0:04:03.080 --> 0:04:06.320 be a working strategy. Yeah, And it was specifically so 0:04:06.360 --> 0:04:10.160 that they could do what is called influencer marketing. Yeah, 0:04:10.200 --> 0:04:13.119 this is something that we're all pretty familiar with these days. It's, 0:04:13.240 --> 0:04:16.120 you know the idea of people who get big followings 0:04:16.160 --> 0:04:19.320 on social media and then brands will reach out to 0:04:19.400 --> 0:04:24.160 them and have those people leverage their fame to market 0:04:24.440 --> 0:04:27.600 on behalf of those brands. Yeah. So what they did 0:04:27.920 --> 0:04:30.680 to get those influencers was they went and they recruited 0:04:30.680 --> 0:04:33.800 all of the quote unquote hot girls that Friendster had 0:04:33.880 --> 0:04:36.039 kicked off of their social media site to join my 0:04:36.120 --> 0:04:40.000 Space um, as well as bands and photographers, really anybody 0:04:40.040 --> 0:04:43.920 who your average Joe Schmo would want to follow and 0:04:44.760 --> 0:04:48.760 be a internet friend of. Yeah. So essentially, the the 0:04:48.920 --> 0:04:52.320 tried and true method of how can we attract people 0:04:52.520 --> 0:04:57.440 to this site? Well, for guys, let's just give them 0:04:57.480 --> 0:05:01.040 the feeling that all these extremely attractive women want to 0:05:01.080 --> 0:05:04.880 be friends with. Yes, the strategy did work. However, later on, 0:05:05.160 --> 0:05:09.560 much much later on, analysts would say that using that 0:05:09.640 --> 0:05:12.039 strategy was sort of a predictor that my Space would 0:05:12.080 --> 0:05:16.880 inevitably fail because they were coming at the angle of 0:05:16.960 --> 0:05:21.960 creating a social networking platform from the wrong position, that 0:05:22.040 --> 0:05:25.719 they weren't doing it as social networking first, then find 0:05:25.720 --> 0:05:27.520 a way to monetize it. They were looking at a 0:05:27.520 --> 0:05:30.080 way to monetize something, and they went to the social 0:05:30.120 --> 0:05:33.560 networking site. Now, in defense of my Space, there wasn't 0:05:33.560 --> 0:05:35.839 a whole lot of precedent for what they were doing. 0:05:36.040 --> 0:05:38.520 I think that focusing on on the individual instead of 0:05:38.560 --> 0:05:41.200 on the networking it's it's something that is called Read's 0:05:41.240 --> 0:05:44.280 law actually, where they say that the success of a 0:05:44.360 --> 0:05:47.200 social network is to get the people to connect with 0:05:47.240 --> 0:05:50.240 each other and do so within groups. Yeah. If you 0:05:50.279 --> 0:05:54.800 get the more people you can get active on your 0:05:54.839 --> 0:05:59.039 social networking site, the more valuable the site is. So, 0:05:59.160 --> 0:06:01.679 and it has to do with not just not really 0:06:01.760 --> 0:06:04.120 just the number, but also the value of the connections 0:06:04.160 --> 0:06:07.880 between the people. And as we will discover, one of 0:06:07.920 --> 0:06:12.680 my spaces challenges was allowing for those meaningful connections to 0:06:12.720 --> 0:06:16.120 have Yeah. Yeah. In two thousand four, my Space breaks 0:06:16.240 --> 0:06:19.080 one million users, a month, and now they're getting some 0:06:19.120 --> 0:06:21.640 bigger names to promote their site, like R. E. M. 0:06:22.200 --> 0:06:24.719 And we're familiar with because you know those are local 0:06:24.720 --> 0:06:30.160 boys athletes Georgia. And they made some design decisions that 0:06:30.200 --> 0:06:34.359 were interesting. Yeah, I mean at face value, they seem 0:06:34.560 --> 0:06:37.600 pretty cool. They decided to let the members guide how 0:06:37.600 --> 0:06:40.400 to build this site, so anybody could take their profile 0:06:40.440 --> 0:06:45.320 page and add whatever widgets, videos, backgrounds, backgrounds, articles they 0:06:45.320 --> 0:06:48.800 wanted to special cursors. Yeah, which you know, from a 0:06:48.880 --> 0:06:51.880 user standpoint like, this is super customizable. This is really cool, 0:06:52.480 --> 0:06:54.920 but in actuality it just led to a bunch of 0:06:55.000 --> 0:07:00.960 really messy cluttered stuff. Yeah. Eye source. With ucebook profiles, 0:07:01.000 --> 0:07:03.000 you know, you can add things like photos. You can 0:07:03.120 --> 0:07:05.880 change out your little cover photo at the top and 0:07:05.920 --> 0:07:08.800 your profile picture, and if you want to, you can 0:07:08.839 --> 0:07:12.119 do things that affect your Facebook profile but not anyone else's, 0:07:12.160 --> 0:07:15.000 Like you could change the language like the pirate or something. 0:07:15.680 --> 0:07:18.160 But my Space had it where you could actually change 0:07:18.240 --> 0:07:22.600 the appearance of your profile, the background color. You could 0:07:22.600 --> 0:07:24.920 put a photo up like that could be like a 0:07:24.960 --> 0:07:28.280 tiled photo as your background cover. You could put in 0:07:28.640 --> 0:07:32.160 various songs that were connected to MySpace, so you could 0:07:32.360 --> 0:07:35.320 have songs playing automatically if you wanted to so as 0:07:35.320 --> 0:07:41.040 soon as someone visited your profile, you know, Matchbox. So 0:07:41.240 --> 0:07:44.360 it was definitely one of those things that I felt. One, 0:07:44.440 --> 0:07:46.800 there was not a cohesive experience, right, you could go 0:07:46.840 --> 0:07:50.280 to two different profiles and have two wildly different reactions 0:07:50.280 --> 0:07:54.160 to it. And for another, it meant that a lot 0:07:54.160 --> 0:07:57.200 of people just kind of took a kitchen sink approach 0:07:57.520 --> 0:08:00.520 to their profiles, like any any sort of switched they 0:08:00.520 --> 0:08:03.000 could toggle on, they were going to toggle and it 0:08:03.080 --> 0:08:06.600 made it super irritating. It actually reminded me a lot 0:08:06.880 --> 0:08:09.760 of Geo Cities, which is another company we could cover 0:08:09.800 --> 0:08:12.800 on the brink at some point. So not the best 0:08:13.280 --> 0:08:16.960 experience once these things were all implemented, although many of 0:08:17.000 --> 0:08:18.960 them were introduced over time, so it wasn't like it 0:08:19.000 --> 0:08:21.840 just instantaneously went to an ice ore. Yeah, and it 0:08:21.880 --> 0:08:24.640 didn't have a negative effect immediately. In fact, my space 0:08:24.680 --> 0:08:26.520 is doing so well that in two thousand and five 0:08:26.560 --> 0:08:29.960 it was purchased by News Corps headed by Rupert Murdoch 0:08:30.160 --> 0:08:34.439 for five and eighty million dollars. Yeah, that more than 0:08:34.520 --> 0:08:37.920 half a billion dollars. Now at the time, people thought 0:08:38.080 --> 0:08:41.680 that's a whole lot of money. Right now, in retrospect, 0:08:41.679 --> 0:08:45.360 people have said that was way too much money. And 0:08:45.880 --> 0:08:47.760 part of this was because they were in a bidding war. 0:08:48.360 --> 0:08:50.840 Wasn't just that they were Yeah, they were actually fighting 0:08:51.040 --> 0:08:54.319 with Viacom to buy it. So this this was something 0:08:54.360 --> 0:08:58.400 where you had two very wealthy companies with very deep 0:08:58.400 --> 0:09:02.240 pockets ready to go after the same property. Things didn't 0:09:02.240 --> 0:09:06.200 go sour immediately. Again, the narrative tends to be the 0:09:06.240 --> 0:09:08.920 news Core spent way too much money buying my Space 0:09:09.240 --> 0:09:12.240 and then my Space tanked, But in reality that's not 0:09:12.400 --> 0:09:16.360 exactly what happened. No, so news Corp bought my Space, 0:09:16.400 --> 0:09:19.040 They're like, you guys, do your thing. Yeah, we're not 0:09:19.040 --> 0:09:23.120 gonna micromanage. Yeah, but they're a big company, and so 0:09:23.280 --> 0:09:26.520 with a big company comes red tape to make any changes, 0:09:26.760 --> 0:09:31.360 to develop things, to resolve conflicts. And so even though 0:09:31.360 --> 0:09:34.719 they didn't intend to interfere, they were still interfering. But 0:09:34.760 --> 0:09:38.480 they weren't interfering in a progressive way. Right. This is 0:09:38.520 --> 0:09:41.360 one of those issues where you've got the culture clash 0:09:41.480 --> 0:09:44.480 from two different organizations, and when they merged together, you 0:09:44.480 --> 0:09:47.600 have to figure out how to reconcile that. Yeah, but 0:09:48.200 --> 0:09:50.720 that being said, by September of two thousand five, my 0:09:50.800 --> 0:09:54.440 Space was up to twenty seven million members, and in 0:09:54.520 --> 0:09:57.800 the following year they would become the most popular, the 0:09:57.920 --> 0:10:01.760 top social network site in the United States. Now, again, 0:10:01.800 --> 0:10:04.439 to be fair, at least, when two thousand six opens, 0:10:05.120 --> 0:10:10.080 you're looking at a pretty barren field for social networking sites. Right, 0:10:10.120 --> 0:10:13.920 Facebook was only open to college students. Facebook had launched 0:10:13.960 --> 0:10:16.720 in two thousand four, and by two thousand and six 0:10:16.760 --> 0:10:19.400 they were open to more than a couple of dozen 0:10:19.720 --> 0:10:24.000 college campuses. But if you didn't have a valid college email, 0:10:24.040 --> 0:10:27.360 you could not have That was frustrating because I had 0:10:27.400 --> 0:10:30.080 friends who do theater, so I've got friends all over 0:10:30.120 --> 0:10:31.920 the age spectrum, and I had some older friends who 0:10:31.920 --> 0:10:35.120 were using their old college emails to get in, and 0:10:35.160 --> 0:10:39.600 I was very envious. I had already graduated college, so 0:10:39.679 --> 0:10:42.360 I didn't have the opportunity, and I didn't maintain a 0:10:42.440 --> 0:10:45.760 college email address. So yeah, I was not able to 0:10:45.800 --> 0:10:48.480 get a Facebook account when it first opened. Also, why 0:10:48.559 --> 0:10:51.480 would any one already have my Space and my Space 0:10:51.520 --> 0:10:55.920 didn't have that restriction. Also, at this time, my Space 0:10:56.080 --> 0:10:58.600 lands a really good deal. They make a deal with 0:10:58.720 --> 0:11:03.280 Google and exclusive deal for ads for three years for 0:11:03.400 --> 0:11:08.319 nine d million dollars based on site traffic. That's an enormous, 0:11:08.480 --> 0:11:12.120 enormous ad deal, obviously, Yes. However, it had an effect 0:11:12.360 --> 0:11:15.200 on the user experience as well, right, yes, because it 0:11:15.240 --> 0:11:18.439 was an enormous ad deal, which meant an enormous amount 0:11:18.480 --> 0:11:22.520 of ads, which made these already cluttered sites even more 0:11:22.520 --> 0:11:26.079 cluttered with things that you couldn't necessarily turn off. All 0:11:26.120 --> 0:11:28.280 of these ads that my Space wanted to push the 0:11:28.320 --> 0:11:32.400 whole behind purpose for my Space. And meanwhile, my Space 0:11:32.440 --> 0:11:36.000 was also starting to get into some trouble due to 0:11:36.200 --> 0:11:42.520 the fact that there were these rather lascivious, provocative images, 0:11:42.600 --> 0:11:46.800 let us say, racy as you have put in photos, 0:11:46.880 --> 0:11:50.560 and this was that was like one of the initial 0:11:50.840 --> 0:11:53.520 strategies that they had to attract people to the site. 0:11:53.520 --> 0:11:55.719 But now they were starting to get a lot more 0:11:55.760 --> 0:11:59.320 attention about these racy photos and to the point where 0:11:59.320 --> 0:12:02.319 people were starting to question whether or not my Space 0:12:02.400 --> 0:12:05.199 might even be a porn site. Yeah. Yeah, there were 0:12:05.240 --> 0:12:09.240 investigations launched to figure out whether they were exposing pornography 0:12:09.280 --> 0:12:12.360 to minors. So now you've got people thinking, well, maybe 0:12:12.400 --> 0:12:15.800 this isn't the safest place for me or my family. 0:12:16.280 --> 0:12:19.920 Maybe instead, I should look to alternatives, and Facebook was 0:12:20.000 --> 0:12:23.000 right around the corner. In September two thousand six, Facebook 0:12:23.080 --> 0:12:27.120 would open up the platform so that anyone with an 0:12:27.160 --> 0:12:30.240 email address who was thirteen years or older could get 0:12:30.280 --> 0:12:33.000 a Facebook profile. Now people did and do still get 0:12:33.040 --> 0:12:36.920 around that age limit. Despite all that, in two thousand seven, 0:12:37.000 --> 0:12:39.920 my Space is still going strong, despite the people saying, well, 0:12:39.960 --> 0:12:42.680 maybe I should try Facebook. Facebook might be a safer 0:12:42.720 --> 0:12:46.880 place for us. And despite the reputation, my Space had 0:12:46.880 --> 0:12:51.320 about three hundred million registered users and a evaluation of 0:12:51.320 --> 0:12:56.719 twelve billion. Twelve that's based on numbers that may or 0:12:56.760 --> 0:12:59.880 may not come true, So right, that's a number that's off. 0:12:59.880 --> 0:13:03.200 The cited that twelve billion dollar valuation. It is very 0:13:03.240 --> 0:13:07.960 difficult to nail down exactly where that value was. It 0:13:08.040 --> 0:13:11.760 was largely in the promise of having three million people 0:13:12.440 --> 0:13:17.239 and an x amount of landscape where they could potentially 0:13:17.240 --> 0:13:21.560 show advertising, and a estimation of how much those ads 0:13:21.640 --> 0:13:24.040 would be worth. It was based on a lot of 0:13:24.679 --> 0:13:29.199 estimations essentially. However, at this time in my Space's heyday 0:13:29.200 --> 0:13:32.880 of use, news Corps decides that it wants to start 0:13:32.920 --> 0:13:35.199 focusing on something else, and that's something else is trying 0:13:35.200 --> 0:13:38.559 to buy the Wall Street Journal, and meanwhile, Facebook is 0:13:38.600 --> 0:13:41.360 starting to catch up. It had not caught up entirely 0:13:41.400 --> 0:13:43.880 to my Space yet, but it was chomping at the heels. 0:13:44.520 --> 0:13:47.600 So here's my Space at its peak, valued at twelve 0:13:47.640 --> 0:13:50.240 billion dollars tons of users. Facebook is catching up. But 0:13:50.360 --> 0:13:52.760 it looked like at the time that even if Facebook 0:13:52.800 --> 0:13:54.560 did catch up, there'd still be plenty of room for 0:13:54.559 --> 0:13:59.319 both platforms to coexist. However, as it turns out, even 0:13:59.320 --> 0:14:01.440 though no one was sure about it yet, my Space 0:14:01.520 --> 0:14:04.959 was actually on the brink and it was just about 0:14:05.000 --> 0:14:07.439 to fall off. We'll explain more in just a moment, 0:14:07.480 --> 0:14:20.160 but first let's take a break to thank our sponsor. Alright, 0:14:20.280 --> 0:14:22.920 So by two thousand and eight, my Space was making 0:14:22.920 --> 0:14:25.760 good money for social media site. Again, not a whole 0:14:25.800 --> 0:14:28.280 lot of competition out there, but they're making good money 0:14:28.440 --> 0:14:31.280 one hundred million dollars in counting. Later on in two 0:14:31.280 --> 0:14:34.240 thousand eight, Facebook takes their number one spot for a 0:14:34.440 --> 0:14:37.160 number of users. My Space was still getting more traffic 0:14:37.200 --> 0:14:40.320 until two thousand nine, but Facebook just had more users 0:14:40.440 --> 0:14:43.720 than my Space, and by the way, that would never 0:14:43.840 --> 0:14:47.400 change Facebook. Facebook would never lose that spot to my 0:14:47.520 --> 0:14:51.720 Space from this point moving forward, So while my Space 0:14:51.840 --> 0:14:55.080 still had more traffic on a day to day basis, 0:14:55.600 --> 0:14:58.120 that was limited because Facebook was already in the lead, 0:14:58.160 --> 0:15:00.800 and it was never kind of look back. It's fair 0:15:00.800 --> 0:15:03.000 to note that Facebook at this time in two thousand 0:15:02.960 --> 0:15:05.840 and eight was already ahead of my Space overseas. This 0:15:05.880 --> 0:15:08.200 is when it overtook my Space in the United States, 0:15:08.720 --> 0:15:12.320 so a complete overtake in that regard, and right towards 0:15:12.360 --> 0:15:14.200 the end of two thousand eight and into the beginning 0:15:14.200 --> 0:15:17.560 of two thousand nine, another big change happens. D Wolf 0:15:17.600 --> 0:15:20.640 and Anderson both leave the company, so that the co 0:15:20.800 --> 0:15:24.920 founders of my Space leave at that point, and they 0:15:24.960 --> 0:15:28.520 both have had things to say about the direction of 0:15:28.560 --> 0:15:32.160 my Space, both when they were running it and when 0:15:32.200 --> 0:15:35.800 news Corps took over, and they're fairly candid. In fact, 0:15:35.840 --> 0:15:38.720 I've read interviews where they were pretty clear about their 0:15:38.760 --> 0:15:41.880 own mistakes. It wasn't just pointing at news Corps saying 0:15:42.120 --> 0:15:44.920 they're the reason that things massed up. They said, we 0:15:45.000 --> 0:15:48.200 made some bad decisions. Tom Anderson, for one, said I 0:15:48.240 --> 0:15:50.480 had this social aspect in my head from the beginning, 0:15:50.600 --> 0:15:53.280 but instead of building it from the onset, we kind 0:15:53.280 --> 0:15:55.120 of tried to overlay it later on, and that was 0:15:55.320 --> 0:15:58.120 more difficult than we expected, right, but the wolf would 0:15:58.200 --> 0:16:02.120 leave first. He would step down officially on April twenty second, 0:16:02.200 --> 0:16:06.280 two nine. And at this point cracks were starting to 0:16:06.320 --> 0:16:09.400 show in my Space. So this got to a point 0:16:09.480 --> 0:16:11.920 also where we have to talk about a feature my 0:16:12.000 --> 0:16:16.080 Space had that paradoxically hurt the company, although it's something 0:16:16.120 --> 0:16:20.600 we normally associate with good business practice, which is transparency. Yeah. 0:16:20.720 --> 0:16:24.440 On Facebook and a lot of social media applications, you 0:16:24.480 --> 0:16:29.120 cannot see when somebody unfriends you or leaves the site. Yeah, 0:16:29.160 --> 0:16:31.600 Like on Twitter, if someone and follows me, I don't 0:16:31.640 --> 0:16:35.200 automatically know. Yeah. On Facebook, you can decline someone's friend 0:16:35.200 --> 0:16:37.560 request and unless they follow up on it, they won't know. 0:16:37.960 --> 0:16:40.280 Or you can defriend them later and again unless they 0:16:40.280 --> 0:16:41.760 follow up on it and say, hey, why am I 0:16:41.800 --> 0:16:45.680 not seeing posts from this person? They don't know, which 0:16:45.720 --> 0:16:47.920 is you know, can be good or bad depending on 0:16:47.960 --> 0:16:51.880 how many people that person is following. But on my Space, 0:16:52.200 --> 0:16:54.920 when you try to access somebody's account, you can see 0:16:54.920 --> 0:16:57.160 the last time they accessed it and whether they are 0:16:57.200 --> 0:17:01.640 an active user or not. So if you go on 0:17:01.960 --> 0:17:03.800 and you see that these people that you were following 0:17:03.840 --> 0:17:07.159 are no longer using my Space, either frequently or at all, 0:17:07.400 --> 0:17:09.280 You might go, why am I even still here? Why 0:17:09.280 --> 0:17:11.520 am I here? Maybe I should stop using it too, 0:17:11.640 --> 0:17:14.800 So that ended up actually being a weakness for my Space. 0:17:15.480 --> 0:17:18.639 One of the other things that was starting to become 0:17:18.680 --> 0:17:22.440 clear is that Facebook had been built from the ground 0:17:22.520 --> 0:17:26.520 up as this social networking platform, whereas my Space had 0:17:26.560 --> 0:17:30.240 come from more of an entertainment perspective. And in fact, 0:17:30.600 --> 0:17:34.680 my Space would really lean into that entertainment side quite 0:17:34.680 --> 0:17:37.560 a bit as time would go on, it would double 0:17:37.640 --> 0:17:41.919 and triple and quadruple down on being related to entertainment, 0:17:42.000 --> 0:17:45.239 largely the music industry, but not only the music Yeah yeah, well, 0:17:45.240 --> 0:17:47.720 I mean largely music industry because they were the first 0:17:47.760 --> 0:17:51.560 adopters pretty much. And then one of the other things 0:17:51.600 --> 0:17:55.920 that differentiated my Space from Facebook was that on Facebook, 0:17:55.920 --> 0:17:58.120 if you wanted a profile, you had to use your 0:17:58.119 --> 0:18:01.600 actual name, and my Space they wanted you to use 0:18:02.000 --> 0:18:07.080 a handle or you know, an alias. And this requires 0:18:07.119 --> 0:18:10.400 some backtracking a little bit. Back in the early days 0:18:10.400 --> 0:18:13.000 of the Internet, the general thought was that you would 0:18:13.119 --> 0:18:16.680 use a handle a nickname everywhere you wouldn't share genuine 0:18:16.680 --> 0:18:20.440 personal information that's not safe It's so different now. Now 0:18:20.520 --> 0:18:23.240 we get into cars with people that we don't know 0:18:23.400 --> 0:18:26.240 that we used an app on our phone to connect 0:18:26.280 --> 0:18:29.640 to right. But back then you wouldn't share your name online. 0:18:29.680 --> 0:18:34.760 It was considered to be dangerous potentially. However, what it 0:18:35.040 --> 0:18:38.280 also allowed you to do on Facebook was look for 0:18:38.320 --> 0:18:41.000 your friends and your family who also had profiles and 0:18:41.040 --> 0:18:43.679 make it very easy to connect with them. On my Space, 0:18:43.920 --> 0:18:46.440 it was not easy to connect with people you knew 0:18:46.720 --> 0:18:51.320 because my Space depended upon shared interests, not whether or 0:18:51.320 --> 0:18:53.840 not you know that person in real life. So you 0:18:53.880 --> 0:18:56.600 could share your MySpace user name with people and they 0:18:56.600 --> 0:18:59.639 could add you that way, but there was no easy 0:18:59.680 --> 0:19:02.960 way with in the network itself for you to track 0:19:03.080 --> 0:19:05.919 down your friends and your family. You just had to 0:19:05.920 --> 0:19:09.000 hope that we're friends like the same weird stuff you liked, 0:19:09.800 --> 0:19:12.600 and sadly not enough people like eating jello and their 0:19:12.640 --> 0:19:14.600 underwear while listening to they might be giants. So I 0:19:14.680 --> 0:19:17.240 had hardly any friends, which I don't understand at all. 0:19:17.320 --> 0:19:19.640 That's like the best thing, don't knock it to get 0:19:19.640 --> 0:19:24.159 trying people. They also had poor product developments, so my 0:19:24.240 --> 0:19:26.280 Space made a bunch of products and features. As we said, 0:19:26.280 --> 0:19:28.840 they were rolled out slowly, but maybe not slowly enough. 0:19:29.240 --> 0:19:31.080 They were poorly built, and they had a lot of bugs, 0:19:31.160 --> 0:19:33.920 and it cost a lot of frustration among the users. 0:19:34.000 --> 0:19:36.359 Yea Krista Wolf would say that one of the big 0:19:36.400 --> 0:19:39.480 reasons he felt my Space faltered was that they were 0:19:39.760 --> 0:19:42.600 spread too thin. They had all these ideas for different 0:19:42.600 --> 0:19:47.080 features they wanted, and instead of contracting that out or 0:19:47.119 --> 0:19:51.160 inviting developers to work on the platform with them, they 0:19:51.200 --> 0:19:53.240 decided to try and tackle it all themselves, and they 0:19:53.280 --> 0:19:55.680 just didn't have the skill set to do it, nor 0:19:55.800 --> 0:19:57.679 did they have the focus because they were trying to 0:19:57.720 --> 0:19:59.280 do too many things at once, and so what you 0:19:59.400 --> 0:20:03.440 ended up with, we're a bunch of half baked features 0:20:03.720 --> 0:20:06.240 that didn't work so well and just added to that 0:20:06.359 --> 0:20:10.679 user experience frustration. Meanwhile, Facebook was taking the different approach. 0:20:10.760 --> 0:20:13.520 They opened up an a p I and application programm 0:20:13.600 --> 0:20:16.560 er interface and they said, if you want to build 0:20:16.720 --> 0:20:21.679 applications on top of the Facebook platform, do it. And 0:20:21.760 --> 0:20:25.320 that meant that you had teams that were really focused 0:20:25.480 --> 0:20:30.800 on creating very specific functions and they could make it really, 0:20:30.840 --> 0:20:33.159 really great because that's all they were working on. They 0:20:33.200 --> 0:20:35.320 just wanted to make that one thing. My Space was 0:20:35.359 --> 0:20:38.200 trying to make all of the one things. Yeah. Yeah, 0:20:38.240 --> 0:20:40.800 so my Space had a bunch of feature bloat on 0:20:40.880 --> 0:20:45.760 top of their ads, yeah, just making it even more messy. Yeah. 0:20:45.800 --> 0:20:48.800 And they also tried to go more global at that time, 0:20:49.080 --> 0:20:54.040 and unfortunately the expansion they couldn't really make a lot 0:20:54.200 --> 0:20:57.720 of progress because Facebook had really taken most of those 0:20:57.720 --> 0:21:02.200 markets already. The one place that was an exception was Mexico. Yeah, 0:21:02.280 --> 0:21:06.040 so in two nine they do it all companies facing 0:21:06.040 --> 0:21:07.919 the brink do and they lay off a bunch of 0:21:07.920 --> 0:21:12.920 employees their employees, right, that was pretty rough. They also, uh, 0:21:12.960 --> 0:21:15.400 this was something I did not know until I read 0:21:15.440 --> 0:21:17.719 the notes that you had put together for this episode. 0:21:18.200 --> 0:21:24.480 My Space was in some ways a banner child for 0:21:24.920 --> 0:21:27.359 the wasteful startup, even though at this point they were 0:21:27.359 --> 0:21:29.000 no longer a startup. They were part of a much 0:21:29.080 --> 0:21:32.040 larger company. One of the things I often associate in 0:21:32.119 --> 0:21:38.080 my head with startup companies is ostentatious expensive office space 0:21:38.600 --> 0:21:44.320 that tends to emphasize style over function. MySpace managed to 0:21:44.359 --> 0:21:47.480 go one better than that. Yeah, they were paying a 0:21:47.520 --> 0:21:50.280 million dollars a month for an office in Paia Vista, 0:21:50.440 --> 0:21:52.359 and they never actually moved in they might have had 0:21:52.400 --> 0:21:55.560 intentions to, but they didn't. So they're paying a million 0:21:55.600 --> 0:21:59.400 dollars a month for an empty office space. Yes, wow, 0:22:00.000 --> 0:22:02.520 all right, yeah, so that that's by the way, we're 0:22:02.520 --> 0:22:04.680 gonna have some lessons at the end of this episode 0:22:04.760 --> 0:22:07.280 about about things that my Space did wrong. I'm just 0:22:07.280 --> 0:22:10.159 gonna cut to the chase here. That's bad businesses to 0:22:10.240 --> 0:22:12.560 pay a million dollars for space that you're not using. 0:22:13.320 --> 0:22:17.040 And news Corps would eventually in say, you know, maybe 0:22:17.080 --> 0:22:20.760 we made a few missteps. We might not have done 0:22:20.800 --> 0:22:23.240 this the best way over the last couple of years, 0:22:23.920 --> 0:22:27.960 which was the entire time that they had had my Space. Yeah, 0:22:27.960 --> 0:22:29.360 they're like three or four years, you know, like you've 0:22:29.359 --> 0:22:31.800 had five, so the first year you were good. In 0:22:31.880 --> 0:22:34.320 two and ten they also decided what we're going to 0:22:34.400 --> 0:22:37.600 fix that, We're just gonna try to copy Facebook, and 0:22:37.840 --> 0:22:41.000 they even integrated with Facebook Connect, but it was too late. Yeah, 0:22:41.040 --> 0:22:45.000 people who were interested in Facebook on Facebook, they need 0:22:45.000 --> 0:22:47.840 to have a second Facebook to their Facebook. It wasn't 0:22:48.080 --> 0:22:50.159