A Note for Myspace

When spending a shitload of money to redesign and revamp your site, change your identity and refocus your business model; you really need to pay attention to how people use it.

The old myspace site was slow, cluttered, full of conflicting navigation, full of irritating ads. The new myspace site is slow, cluttered, full of conflicting navigation, full of irritating videos and ads.

They have clearly learnt nothing at News Corp. Even at its worst, Facebook lets you see everything you want in one go, at minimal fuss. Myspace wants you to drag and search around before you find anything.

It's not like they didn't ask. I did the longest questionnaire in history a few months back describing everything that was wrong, and what we got was the same site but looking a little nicer.

Focusing on music is a smart move for myspace, sadly they seem to have got everything else wrong.

Chirpy Chirpy Tweet Tweet

It took me a while to get into twitter. It felt a little strange to be part of this tech community that kept telling us where they were having lunch.

Yet about the same time I got into it everyone started talking about like it was the second coming of communications christ. This world of celebrities and communities talking shit in 140 characters, how could this be so effective?

Well, the simple answer is this: The Internet has Changed Human Relationships Forever.

Just think about this logically, for thousands of years we have kept a small close social group of family and friends. People who we didn't talk to faded out into memory.

Then we got phones, and the number we kept in touch with increased a bit.

But now what we have is totally different. We are a generation group who theoretically now can keep in touch with everybody we have ever met. Human relationships have NEVER had that, not in all of mankind's existence have we been able to speak to and hear about everyone we know for the rest of our lives.

This change isn't just about our use of technology, our increased learning and input. This is a fundamental change in the nature of what it means to be human, to be a pack species.

Twitter and facebook are the current facilitators of this change. Taking the groups and communities we had with Myspace and Friends Reunited, crossing them with the conversation of chat rooms; and creating a stream of pack data. Our lives and our families and friends and favourite people and brands and colleagues fed in a constant stream accessible anytime we want.

I like to think that next time we hype up social networking, we remember that regardless of how we see it from a technological and popularity viewpoint; the very concept is part of a sea change in the nature of our species. And that is part frightening, and part exhilarating.

Let's Facebook It.

Watching the Money Programme talking about Facebook and the huge amounts of data they are collecting and able to use for marketing purposes; I was rather puzzled how they seem to completely miss the point of how to make these things work.

People go to Facebook because it doesn't shove ads in your face all the time. Yet all their plans (from what I've read) seem to involve doing just that. The pressure of those sky high valuations appears to be clouding their judgement.

Have they not seen what has happened to Myspace? The decline of Myspace as 'the place to be' is almost directly proportional to the increasing amount of overt advertising and Fox promotional links that have appeared since Rupert Murdoch took it over.

Have they not worked out that THE reason for Google making so much money so quickly was that it found a way to display high-income ads without disrupting the user experience.

The only advertisers that have really worked on Myspace and Facebook are those that embrace the community instead of standing there with Golf Sale signs in front of their way. We can do that in the outside world, but these are places people come to get away from that...

Thoughts anyone?

Also: Though the different gadgets and tools you can get on Facebook massively enhance it, they are also quickly increasing the thing that is now choking myspace. Namely "Forward this or you crush will hate you", "Pass this to twenty friends and something cool will happen", "This picture says I am your friend please pass it on". Argh! People who come up with these things deserve to be rounded up and chucked off a bridge...