Will MySpace ever lose its monopoly? (2007)

I remember moving to FB when my mom joined MySpace... I've since straight up quit social media, but I know folks that moved on to IG/Snap so they could broadcast content they didn't want certain social groups to see via FB. Of course now those social groups are joining the newer mediums.

Maybe social media platforms are inherently cyclical? At least under the "maximum growth" mindset:

* Innovators develop new platforms because they're unhappy with the old

* Early adopters like the new platform's features or community

* If it's good enough, the early majority slowly follows as knowledge disseminates

* New features and narratives are developed to attract the late majority and laggards

* The presence of those people, and tactics used to attract them, disenfranchise the early adopters

* Unhappiness rises until a new digital eden is discovered. Then the cycle repeats

I think what killed AIM, MSN, etc. was SMS. You had to meet your friends in person at school or be home in front of a computer to talk to your friends. With SMS you can talk to them anytime, anywhere. Then smartphones came out and apps like WhatsApp, FB Messenger and LINE took over.

I don't think MySpace vs Facebook is really a real comparison. Facebook has reached a level of ubiquity that MySpace could never have dreamed of.

That little white F in a blue square is a global symbol and it won't be undone in a few bouts of bad PR.

I think we, the tech literate, forget just how other people interact with tech. I need only to look at my parents interacting with Facebook to see how they're still so addicted to it (my aunt still is addicted to candy crush ffs).

Don't forget all the social lock in Facebook has on you: a decade's worth of photos and all the friends you picked up along the way.

Sure, people are unplugging, but I personally think they've got critical mass.

I suspect that was very geographical, over here (Norway) young people were on MSN Messenger. It was practically universal for anybody who wasn't an old fart.

The cohort of young people that used AIM/MSN/Y! (depending on your region) aged up into Facebook Chat [1]. Facebook captured the 'chat with people you know in real life' usecase, gradually leaving distance-only or interest-specific friends on the old chat networks. This greatly contributed to their decline.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15417521

It's crazy how much more complex it feels like communication has become. Back then basically all of your RL friends were either on AIM or not online at all. If you were a more tech/internet savvy person you probably also had ICQ for many of the people you met online and you might hang out in a couple of IRC channels. Today even if you aren't a digital social butterfly you probably have half a dozen different messaging/chat apps.

You mean everyone in your region. Nobody I knew was on AIM. Everyone was on MSN Messenger.

I find it interesting you think the fall of Facebook-like platforms will affect Snapchat. As far as I'm aware Snapchat is popular for the same reason WhatsApp is - you send your updates to people you choose too, not some huge acquaintance-list or group of 'followers'.

And after AIM my friends migrated to Gchat. The real mystery to me is why Google let Gchat wither on the vine. For many years it was my primary way of chatting with friends. (Now it's iMessage.)

I can see that happening.

Facebook exploded in the desktop web era. For today's kids desktops are for work, not socialising except when playing games online using Skype or Discord.

My girls are 13 and 14 and just created Facebook pages purely for updates on activities for a club. Everything else is in WhatsApp, WeChat (for Chinese relatives), Instagram, etc. Lightweight special purpose apps linked to tight groups of friends. The last generation wanted a one-stop solution to their social media needs. The new generation see that as some unwieldy monolithic platform for mums and dads.

Having said that, if there is a place of a monolithic platform like that maybe facebook is it. They can probably still stay relevant and useful, they're just not the be-all and end-all of social media they appeared to be. I hope.

Instagram seems like it would be the most resilient. It's so low level, with few gimmicks, you just share a piece of media. Humans will want to share with each other until the end of time. Snap and fb have interesting features but it's less clear whether they will always remain popular.

What are some shifts that can take Instagram down? The main one I can think of is decentralizion and owning/controlling your own data, but that would hit almost everything.

Do you think the shift away from these sites will be structural/technological (again, like if the world generally moves towards a different business model than data collection), or do you think these sites will be hit for specific reasons?

I'm wondering if the following scenario could push Whatsapp out of its leading position. Imagine a platform (Android or iOS) to develop an API for a "message center" where all information from email, chat, system messages come together. This message center will then become the main place for users to read their messages. At this point, the user doesn't really care which app the messages came from, and Whatsapp has lost grip on its leading position.

Young people were on AIM st one point, but it seemed like the generation before was on ICQ and the generation after was on MSN messenger. Then the generation after that was probably on Skype, then hangouts/FB messenger after that? And now Snapchat?

I was a weirdo making stuff before I researched if it already existed back in 2004.

I made a site for musicians to post music, sell or distribute it merch, control previews, analytics, yadayada all on an calpop p4 server when my then gf told me about Myspace.

I moved on to other things when she showed me FB and I learned I couldn't sign up without a .edu, they lost me there.

I registered in 2006 for a blind date, uploaded a pic of a salad bowl, never spelled my name correctly or used my real dob (I'm a melinnial and knew in 94 compartmentalize my online behavior) and doubled with an ethos crafted around consistency, I've done alright for my generation.

No friends, but still alive!

The content stays the same, but the medium changes. Most content is either written word, voice (like radio) or video (television -> youtube). The medium that content lives in will always change.

I think positioning a product that would allow you to move your content between the different mediums (i.e. myspace to facebook to ??? or blogger -> wordpress -> Medium) would be huge. Something like IFTTT but on steroids.

Facebook represents the nuanced version of expression of existing culture( albeit only shiny one). Social validation is here to stay. So is FB.

Back in 1999, I would've found it absolutely inconceivable to not chat with my HS classmates on ICQ.

In fact I still have my ICQ # memorized (there were numbers not screen names or email addresses).

Before that, IRC :)

All they needed to die was something new and shiny that people felt could be a credible alternative.

NJ USA used AIM. I still never found anything better than the search feature they used to have. I would search for "female", "North jersey", and I think even age.... then send a message to everyone that popped up.

I remember having to reload my Nokia brick phone with like 100 text messages. That was painful and just filled in the gaps until I could get back to AIM on a PC.

I felt that way about ICQ, back in the day.

Frustratingly AIM is actually really good these days, but that doesn't help if none of your friends are on it.

I never got AIM... I think around that time I had ICQ

Yahoo messenger! was huge in Vietnam.

No, ICQ was the shit back then!

And myspace had 75m monthly active users at its peak.

This really does look like a bad comparison.

Maybe you could adjust for total internet users then and now but I doubt that would make a difference.

Edit: (dubious) source:

https://startupbros.com/myspace-the-rise-fall-and-rise-again...

Probably half of that are fake profiles, profiles made by people for commercial purposes or bots. If you make fake account and you will start wandering in the endless facebook steppes, you will notice that many of them are one post account that advertise or play games. The best ones are those with pictures of known or lesser known models to collect friends and sell such an account for dollars later. I have reported several hundred of such profiles, of which maybe 1/20 have been blocked rest is fine because moderators can't see difference between real life person and photo from google images in 20 accounts in a row...

"Facebook" is more like a suite than a single service. For example, I use Facebook almost every day, but I never look at my newsfeed, and virtually never post to it. I basically only log in for 2 specific private groups that use it for scheduling.

It would be easy to replace, if that group of friends/colleagues decided to use something else for collaboration. We don't need to replace all 100 services they offer. We need only a couple.

I suspect that's how Facebook is going to end. We're not all going to stop going to "facebook.com" overnight. Someone will steal away chat (Twitter?), someone will steal away photos (Flickr?), someone will steal away events, and so on, until it's been picked clean.

If you assume 1 MOD account means one person 30% of the world's population uses Facebook. At one point 23% of the world's population belonged to the British empire [0]. Facebook falling would be similar to the British empire decline.

[0] http://theunbrokenwindow.com/Development/MADDISON%20The%20Wo... (page 97)

We all quit watching the 2014 FIFA World Cup at the same time... so it's only a factor of 2 difference from that.

Mmm... 2.2B MAU. When you think about how they counted them, probably they used HyperLogLog. In usual configuration, it has a 0.7 - 1% error. Basically a medium-sized country...

Or the number of users that any startup founder will die for...

It is impressive what Facebook managed to build, but, although the number is staggering, the relative amount of people that switched from horses to cars or to electricity for illumination from candles and burning oil is even bigger... People do not voluntarily stop using something, but the force of innovation is huge. Very few Fortune 500 companies even existed 100 years ago, and the pace of disruption is accelerating...

Will it actually be "the first time in human history that two billion people all decided at once to give up on something"? How many users of leaded gasoline were there? I guess that wasn't "all at once", though.

MySpace didn't suddenly disappear, it fizzled out over a long time. Also, the relevant metric isn't the total number of users -- this is a massive parallellisable process -- it's the average network-effect lock-in per user. For one thing, networks are fairly segmented around geographies. And that's what makes the MySpace analogy relevant: people thought it would never go away because it had very strong network effects, everybody you care about is on it.

Facebooks demise doesn't require the coordinated action of two billion people. Network effects work the other way as well: when people do leave, they make the experience a little worse for all their contacts, lowering the bar for them to leave as well.

Sure, the number of users probably extends the long tail of the demise, indeed I expect Facebook to hang around as at least a low-engagement contact book/messenger platform for a long time. Their demise will look more like Yahoo than MySpace, but the MySpace story does tell us that network effects aren't magical spells that can never be broken, and network effects are Facebooks most important moat.

I'm curious about how many people were on the internet at Myspace's peak though.

Seems a lot of the online world is on Facebook now, but technology does make it very easy to switch platforms at a moment's notice when the new thing comes out. As you've stated, it's MUCH harder to change a core part of one's identity.

Facebook's metric probably counts me as a user because once or twice a month I watch a video that happens to be on Facebook. Be careful about taking that number too seriously.

The 19 Billion chickens in the world scoff at your bookface.

you also have to consider how many people actual connected to the internet back then... most connected with a desktop computer. nowadays, everyone with a phone has the internet in their hand.

2.2 billion is a bullshit number, plain and simple.

You can subtract one. I'm not on it anymore.

I have a sneaking suspicion that with every dissolved monopoly future monopolies get stronger. They must religiously case study all prior cases and strengthen the right areas.

The other examples weren't really monopolies. AT&T was a monopoly, but there were other camera and film manufactures even in the Kodak days. Just because they're the biggest doesn't make them a monopoly.

Google is probably the closest to a modern day monopoly in many (but not all) markets. The competitors like DDG, Bing and Yahoo make up such a small percentage of the market share that Google has become the de-facto standard for search, unless you're in places like China and Russia.

I'm using the term loosely too, because technically a Monopoly is when only a single supplier exists on the market. Typically monopolies start out as government agencies (AT&T, Telstra, TelecomNZ .. telecos are great examples of this btw) but the rest are really relative monopolies. There are other suppliers, but they pale in market percentage (Microsoft was declared a monopoly by many EU courts even when people were still using macos).

Indeed. The Pennsylvania Railroad Company still holds the record for longest sequence of years (over 100) paying out stock dividends.

Sic transit gloria mundi!

Social platforms are much "easier" to rebuild and actually gain market share with (because they're to a large extent self-contained, you "just" need the users).

No company is really competing with Google on search. There's DuckDuckGo and all that, which is a nice idea, but their results are just nowhere near as good as Google's in most cases.

> how people feel about Google and Amazon, or Sears in the 1920s and Kodak in the 1960s

Or IBM.

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/02/15/business/us-vsibm.html

I'm not so sure that FB's place will be so fleeting. I think they will lose their place at the same rate that Microsoft lost theirs. They will still be around in 15 years later, just not quite as relevant.

"Fleeting" - in that another more permanent and more powerful monopoly supersedes them, such as Wordstar, then Wordperfect, then Word. Eventually the roulette ball comes to rest, particularly if the laws that countervail market power aren't enforced.

In the meantime a monopoly can have a huge effect on people's lives.

I was slow to join Facebook and I signed up in late 2006, several months before this article was written. The author here was just out of touch.

In September 2006 Facebook opened to everybody. At the end of the year, Facebook had 12 million active users, roughly doubling their number from 2005. By April 2007 they had 20 million users. By the end of the year they had 50 million. The author wrote this piece right in the middle of Facebook's meteoric growth and they didn't even notice.

The press had the same blindness over AOL Time Warner. To 13-year-old me, that merger sounded like a dinosaur from the Cretaceous combining with a dinosaur from the Jurassic, but for some reason all the papers thought AOL was the business of the future. They had no sense for what was cool.

A local maxima perhaps.

It’s quite typically Guardian in that it manages to combine preachy, pseudo-scholarly, smug and wrong. But it’s way down the scale on hypocritical outrage to be a global maxima.

Can you explain stereotypes of the Guardian? The article is pretty over the top, but as an American I am not intimately familiar with them like, say, the Journal.

Comedy doesn't seem to fair well on HN, but at least Arrested Development is still sacrosanct.

bravo

I can hear it perfectly.

Facebook != Palo Alto. The real estate in Palo Alto is propped up by far more than just Facebook. Mainly by massive amounts of venture capital flowing into startups.

their value will plummet by half to one million dollar.

Maybe I can finally buy a house in the Bay!

The "face-planting" could be regional. It's possible North American and European users might drop off swiftly while FB continues to grow in other parts of the world.

Right, a social network gaining market power and maybe abusing that? Ha, those days are long gone, kappa.

There are a few projects that try and address this. The issue for 99% of the population is that you need to run it yourself (read run a server) or know someone who does.

You could go the p2p route (I'm thinking Torrents + magnet links kind of decentralised) so you just run a client and connect to the network.

Of course this then leads to the problem that users would have to backup their data (which they don't) and be online to participate with no real capacity for offline comms. Which leads back to needing to running a server of some kind.

You're correct, IBM is more of a monopoly in the mainframe market now than ever before.

As far as I know, no one else makes mainframe hardware anymore aside from storage racks you can use with an IBM mainframe.

But isn't instagram (and also Snapchat) mostly photo sharing? How can that replace a communication tool?

Do young people really like chatting in public comments and in that cumbersome Snapchat chat?

Mostly I've seen teen girls just writing and "luv ya bb" under each others photos...

There's another article from a few months later about Facebook "opening up" their platform with apps. They were taking over fast at that point.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/may/31/newmedia....

I think the turning point was the acquisition by Murdoch. Up to then nobody was taking much notice.

I hear Mastodon [1] is getting traction, though for me the UI is a bit unintuitive.

[1] http://joinmastodon.org

I don't think we'll see another breakout until someone comes up with a new killer use case. "Basically Twitter but with no users" and "Basically Facebook but with no users" is not a compelling proposition.

You aren’t asking for perfect security so I'll just mention Telegram.

I use it with my friends and family after WhatsApp betrayed us.

Works really well for us but isn't like Facebook at all.

The differences is it isn't broadcast-focused or build-huge-networks focused but is more organic.

I'm sticking with Facebook. They're the only social network with whom I can trust my private data.

They don't call it the Grauniad for nothing!

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Eye#In-jokes

Updated, thank you!

The per university rollout of Facebook was genius. Actually keeping people from signing up until there is critical mass is, I suspect, crucial for building a social network.

There's nothing to discourage me from coming back quite like the feeling of signing up and finding out I'm the only one I know.

You mean 95% respond in English?

> unlike those darn French!

That's mostly Parisians, the rest of the country will generally see you trying and respond in English.

Why do you hope that? Are you a FB shareholder?

Hate to break your heart...

Maybe just a coincidence with the timing, uh..? ;-)

What exactly is declining? Their MAU, Time Spent, # Advertisers, and Revenue numbers are all increasing (https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/facebook-2-billion-users/). Maybe they're just declining in eyes of SV bubble residents.