Week 3: The fall of Myspace

One of the tasks set for this week was to research into a social networking community that has faded from popularity. Some of the suggestions included AOL, Napster and friendster, however I had no shadow of a doubt as to what social network I was to choose. Myspace was an old friend of mine, we spent hours together, it knew me so well, and as unfortunate as it sounds, I was at one stage addicted. With 2009's rise of Facebook I was so pathetically reluctant to let myspace go that I was one of the last of my friends to move on, and I am glad to say that I have never looked back.

Many of the links suggested by google were all dated around the same time: 2009. Myspace's decline was so damaging that even the internet has said that it was old news. It is clear that 2009 was not a good time for Myspace. While Facebook had exploded worldwide, the company's user traffic had shriveled to half it numbers in comparison to previous months (Sarno, 2009). Not only was Facebook a contender for Myspace's consumers, but the release of new social networking mediums like Twitter and Bebo really pushed them further into their grave (Sarno, 2009). It is said that the reasons towards its downfall included it's theory to stick to a "portal strategy" which revolved more on the entertainment content of the site whereas Facebook enhanced the social networking experience by providing a "newsfeed" (Smith, 2009). Myspace was continually playing catchup with its advancements in social media technology and therefore could no longer stand as number one (Smith, 2009).

As for the future, I think that the photo sharing app Instagram will rise in popularity and quickly. Currently, there are 30+ million users sharing an average of 5 million photos each day (Abraham, 2012). If that isn't brilliant then I don't know what is.

References

Abraham, Craig. "The Rise of Instagrammers." The Age. N.p., 14 June 2012. Web. 11 Aug. 2012. http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/cameras/the-rise-of-the-instagrammers-20120613-208qt.html.

Sarno, David. "How Myspace Fell off the pace." The LA Times. N.p., 17 June 2009. Web. 11 Aug. 2012. http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jun/17/business/fi-ct-myspace17.

Smith, David. "MySpace Shrinks as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo Grab Its Users." The Guardian.co.uk. N.p., 29 Mar. 2009. Web. 11 Aug. 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/29/myspace-facebook-bebo-twitter.

Annotation: David Smith's article on Myspace's fall from the top was very interesting as it possessed several statistics and was written extremely well. I thought that Smith's article was the best out of the three that I had used to create this writing task.