I was about 12 years old when a kid on my block showed up with a Huffy freestyle bike. All he ever did on it was pop wheelies and try to bunny hop cracks in the street in our neighborhood. Somehow we all thought it was really cool. We sat on the sidewalk on our cheap crappy BMX racing wanna-be bikes and marveled at the stunt pegs and wheel covers.
Fast-forward about two years and my friends and I were pulling decades, riding vert and pretty much spending every waking moment doing stunts or crashing, usually both. We had real GT, Haro or Dyno freestyle bikes, we obsessed over the smallest detail, and the Huffy kid, still on the tank huffy, wouldn’t dare do a bunny hop in our presence for fear of looking like a poser. Yea, kids are mean, and we would have given him hell, but I was 14 man, let it go.
So what does this have to do with social networking? Well, if it’s not already painfully obvious, Myspace is the Huffy of social networks and Facebook is now the shiny GT World Tour, bright pink with some Skyway mags… man am I old.
Myspace had it all, the users, the vibe, the momentum and the world’s attention. The problem is that now, 5 years after it was founded, it looks largely the same, has the roughly the same features, and is buckling under the weight of spam, scams and bad press.
Meanwhile Facebook looks like the Cadillac of social networks attracting everyone from high school teeny boppers to my mom and dad! I can’t seem to find a demographic that isn’t at least somewhat represented on Facebook. 60% of my graduating high school class is on Facebook. Much of my family is on Facebook. It’s big, and it’s also clean, fast and stays out of your way.
Blocking contact from people you don’t know was a brilliant move and now people don’t feel bombarded on Facebook, they feel like they have the control. It’s nearly addictive to keep up with people you haven’t spoken to in as much as 20 years. It’s fun to see where everyone is, what their families look like, etc.
I wonder if Myspace’s ownership sees the errors of their ways. Surely managed differently, Facebook would have never had the opportunity to so completely obliterate Myspace.
I am going to single out YouTube and MySpace here. This is a simple post, it’s about user experience, it’s straight to the point…
Don’t send me an email saying I have a comment or new message and NOT tell me what the message IS! I know you want traffic and all, but get real,that’s just lame.
Ok, I am done, thanks for listening!
For the record, thanks Facebook for getting that one right.
Ina Fried had a chance to interview Chris Jones, Vice President of Windows Live at Microsoft. There were a few interesting points:
On Open Social
“I think on OpenSocial we’re honestly just still looking at it. It’s more of a gadget platform than a social-networking approach. It’s a way to add gadgets to pages with a couple of extensions to it. That’s been a very interesting thing for Facebook and it’s taken off, and OpenSocial to me looks like a way for a set of people to try to participate in that phenomenon that’s happened on Facebook. So, we’ll just take a look at it and see as it evolves and as we listen to customers and developers if it’s something we should do.”
On the Mac
“We’ve always been real supporters of the Macintosh platform in our applications business. In the case of Office and Messenger we have great Macintosh experiences of both of those things.
“I think moving forward we’re going to look at the Mac like any other platform and just say where is the demand for customers to go and use and consume our services, and where is there an opportunity for us to do work.
“So, certainly that starts with just really doing great support for Safari as a browser, and for Firefox on the Mac as a browser for people who use those, continuing to have a great experience in Messenger, and then evaluating over time what sets of features that we should add to either our Office applications or to new experiences on the Mac.
“We think the Mac is a great platform, and we’re just going to try to figure out the right balance of investment to put on that platform. I think you have to more go scenario by scenario. So, experience by experience there will be a question of is a browser-based solution enough, should we hook in with an existing application, or do we put new software on the Macintosh. I think there is no blanket statement I can make about the Mac, except to say we think the Macintosh is a great platform, and we think that customers should be able to get to their Windows Live stuff on the Mac, and we’ll continue to evaluate ways to do that.”
I’ll definitely be curious to see where Microsoft will try to fit into this. Recently I was was offered a position at a social network startup and I had to decline. The social network landscape is the wild west of the Internet right now and it’s interesting to see where it’s going to go. It’s scary the momentum Myspace has built, and impressive how fast Facebook is seemingly able to make up ground. You still have to fear the unknowns though. Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are not likely to rest on their laurels and let these startups make all the money. The Internet is about advertising these days and there is no better way to generate page impressions than letting your customers generate your content.
I’ll definitely keep my eye out.
