Image source: Flickr Creative Commons
Once the king of Social Networks, MySpace’s fall from grace has been an amazing watch. As of today, MySpace Australia and New Zealand are no more. At its peak, MySpace Australia had over 2 Million users, but has fallen victim to the success of Facebook. MySpace was great for its time, but its main issue was failure to innovate and match consumer needs.
When compared to Facebook, MySpace also suffered from a lack of standardisation and simplicity. MySpace users could (and usually did) customise their pages to excess, its important to remember, most people aren’t designers. Too much freedom can produce a terrible user experience if put in the wrong hands, this is exactly what happened to MySpace.
Even the implementation of music, seemingly MySpace’s biggest strength was implemented in a confronting way. Auto-play tracks when visiting profile pages were just offensive.
The transition from MySpace to Facebook was so rapid that in just a couple of years, almost all of MySpace users now had a Facebook account. Overtime even the most loyal fans of MySpace found it was difficult to remain with the platform as all their friends jumped ship.
So now MySpace is gone in Australia, its likely its only a matter of time before MySpace internationally falls as well. Facebook should stop the pain now and introduce Facebook music to properly support music artists. While Pages are available to bands, it doesn’t provide the ability to preview tracks and / or watch videos. Once Facebook Music is launched, it’ll be the final nail in the coffin and the once mighty MySpace will be no more.
Even more interesting that there’s no blog post or press release announcing this, they left it to reporters from Triple J’s Hack program to announce this afternoon.
"Today, MySpace Australia and New Zealand has ceased operations."
Will you miss MySpace?