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Comment by askafriend | Hacker News Reader

The MySpace argument is tired and stale and not even that insightful. MySpace made several mistakes as a company that had nothing to do with their premise (connecting people, the same as Facebook). It just turned out that Facebook had better execution in the long run.

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Just because the myspace argument is stale doesn't mean it's wrong.

I don't know if you remember how that went down, but people loved myspace. It worked well, then all the cool kids jumped to Facebook. It was herd mentality.

Definitely a trend situation over product features.

With network effects, you live by the sword and you die by the sword.

I disagree, Myspace could have done incredibly well if they focused on their strengths in music early on. Instead they wanted to be a media company going in a bunch of different directions, which sounds very very familiar. Snap is doing publishing with content partners, they announced special formatted tv shows, hardware and glasses, AR and adtech.

Wanting to be big in music = wanting to be a media company, and comes with a similar set of pitfalls, namely being beholden to a bunch of anti-tech established music companies. Also, I'd challenge whether there is room for incredible success. What's the biggest music success? Spotify? Pandora? Compare that to Facebook, and it is clear which direction had more potential.

>big in music = wanting to be a media company

I would disagree, being a publishing company, a movie review company, a comic book company, video company ... these are all things Myspace was attempting, is not the same as being a music company.

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