The rise and fall of MySpace |01 July 2011

A lot of money, to be sure, but not even a tenth of the half a billion dollars Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp paid for the company just a couple of years ago.

At the height of its powers as the go-to site for social networking, My Space was one of the top-four visited websites in the world and was credited with launching everything from pop star careers to political campaigns. But what caused its star to fall so fast?

The answer is simple. Facebook.

“Social networking sites rely on a crucial tipping point. Once a large enough group choose one particular network, they will be followed by all of their friends and families. Equally, when a large enough group stop using a site, so all of their networks will leave with them,” said Internet Service Provider Kokonet’s Romano Laurence.

“Seychelles’ internet traffic usually mirrors that in the rest of the world and we’ve seen a dramatic drop in the number of users logging on to MySpace and a massive increase in people browsing Facebook,” he said.

The new MySpace owners have taken on singer Justin Timberlake as a joint-investor, hoping some of his charisma will rub off on the site, but it seems unlikely that it will be able to claw back market share from Facebook.

Indeed, the question is less likely to be whether MySpace can make a come-back, but which new challenger will one day push Facebook to one side.

“Before the arrival of Facebook, nobody could have predicted that MySpace would fall out of favour so quickly. It’s all based on what a social networking site offers its users and how it meets their needs. The real genius lies in identifying a need internet users don’t even realise they have, then creating the platform for them to fulfil it,” said Mr Laurence.

A seemingly impossible task perhaps. But the lightening fast pace of web development and vast number of professional web developers and enthusiastic amateurs, means you can be sure that the next big leap is never far off.

And thanks to unlimited broadband internet connections such as Kokonet and the growing number of computer-savvy young Seychellois, who knows, the next Mark Zuckerberg might be hard at work on Mahé, Praslin or La Digue right now.

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