MySpace slips to middle-of-road as Facebook surges ahead
MYSPACE, the website that redefined the meaning of friends in cyberspace, is showing signs of fatigue, with latest figures indicating that Australians - or at least hip ones - are deserting it for rival Facebook.
Context & Ripple Effects
The fatigue signs are not new: a month earlier, Compete data had Facebook ranked third in page views while MySpace fell nearly 20 percent, and this report adds an audience-quality angle — the early adopters who defined MySpace's culture are the ones moving. Days before this story ran, Rupert Murdoch and Chris DeWolfe mounted a defensive push at the Web 2.0 conference, announcing the MySpace Platform, new privacy controls, and a Skype-powered voice call service aimed at building the world's largest online voice-connected community.
Facebook, meanwhile, is widening its funnel on two fronts: it opened its Application Directory and app pages to non-logged-in visitors and to Google's search index, and its growth is described as encroaching on traditional web email providers' turf. The contest is therefore about more than raw membership — it is closed community versus searchable platform.
First-order effects
- MySpace's Web 2.0 announcements — the developer platform, privacy controls, and end-of-November Skype voice integration — now land against a shrinking traffic base, raising the stakes for whether new features can hold the hip users already decamping.
- Facebook gains a discovery channel MySpace lacks: application pages indexed by Google mean its ecosystem is visible to anyone searching the open web, not just members.
Second-order effects
- As the trendsetting Australian cohort moves, advertisers following that audience will force both networks to compete on engagement quality rather than registered-member counts, pressuring MySpace's ad pitch under News Corp.
- Email providers face a second front: if Facebook keeps absorbing messaging habits, the rivalry stops being MySpace-versus-Facebook and becomes social networks versus webmail.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social network competition shifts structurally from walled-garden scale to platform openness — APIs, search visibility, and third-party developers become the moat, a template MySpace is explicitly copying with its own platform launch.
The trend: Social networking leadership is flipping from member-count walled gardens toward open, searchable platforms, forcing incumbents like MySpace to re-platform mid-decline.