It simply cannot.

The thing is, Myspace was never actually a pure social network that tried to replicate offline social connections and interactions online. Myspace was an environment in which you could create a persona (real or not), explore new music, brands, books and film and meet people, often from outside your current friendship group… and in 2000 it was a good place to do it. People also used it as an environment to connect with their friends, organise nights out, catch up and chat - but that was only one string in Myspace’s bow.  And that many-stringed bow was going to be their downfall…

The thing is, for most people the human connections was where they found value - but Myspace didn’t want to listen.

In fact lots and lots of people just wanted a more efficient way to keep in touch with, learn more about, and organise events with people they already know.  Enter, stage left, Facebook…

Facebook is a social interaction tool that replicates and, in many ways  compliments and enhances offline conversations (did you watch, did you see, do you want to go, did you hear). It is a pure translation of the core human need for people to connnect to others around them

Design, functionality and IA wise it has that one aim. In many ways online was the natural platform and environment for many of these coversations - and Facebook became more powerful as a result. It was a natural fit for Web’s core strengths (timeliness <- demonstrated by the insane value the friend feed offered, sharing, no need to tell many people the same thing, connect to people regardless of location).

Not only does FB replicate something people do anyway, online - it helps you do it better! (The only thing that allows people to use FB in a different way is the widgets - hence their relegation to their own tab - a fantastic decision on the part of Facebook.)

In other words, Facebook relegated Myspace to a second-tier social network.

That’s not to say Myspace doesn’t have a product, or value to offer - it’s just to say that currently it’s a confused hybrid of a service hopelessly trying - but ultimately failing - to add value to people’s everyday lives.

If Myspace want volume like FB they have to shift their whole strategy back to human connections done well:
1. Insist everyone uses real names
2. Move music functionality into widgets and basically hide it.
3. Make the interactions and functionality intuitive. There is much work to be done.
4. Remove feature creep (potentially FB’s downfall: see Twitter).
5. Make data open so that it can be the online destination / hold for all your personal info but users can mine their own data from MS through other sites and services. If my whole life is charted on one space I am going to be loathe to leave it it.
6. Listen to the audience and analytics and make decisions based on offering value not generating revenue.

Else, they can focus on what they have traditionally done better at - an environment to create a persona rather than the real you, and associate yourself with celebrities, watch video, find new music etc etc. But add the tools and functionality to do this well.

Myspace should be Spotify, it should be hulu, it should be last.fm - infact it should be all of these and more. Instead it is a poor relic of day’s gone by and a rather crappy second tier social network - and sadly for them, everyone else has moved on…

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These meandering thoughts are a work in progress and I would love to know if you agree or disagree. Please leave a comment below.

Sure, I got how it could help brands connect to their customers, how news stories could break there in real time, how it keeps people in touch, and the rest… but mainly I thought it was a overhyped fad full of the inane ramblings of egomaniacs.

That all changed today, when I realised the full potential of the service after manipulating the data pushed out by the service, using the twitter API. I started thinking about what could be done with twitter mashups and came up with the following random thoughts:

There’s conversations, lots of them
The crux of twitter - people pushing out small nuggets of text (less than 140 characters) they consider noteworthy, and others deeming it interesting enough to interrupt their day.  A quick search on twitter will show just how much noise there is, but different people find value in different things. There is however, no doubt that valuable conversations are going on with twitter, many of them outside the network of people you follow - and this is where mashups come in.

Why twitter data is ideal for mashups

The twitter API is 10X more popular than the site itself. Twitter has made available all the data pushed out by users for manipulation by your website or application. What can you do with it? The great thing is, although you’ve got quantity you haven’t got insane breadth - you have a username, tweet text, @ name, and potentially a location and picture with twitpic - all incredibly valuable when manipulated in certain ways, but not overwhelming.

This data is filterable
Users can filter out the noise of the conversation by choosing who to follow. If the person you follow starts pushing out more noise than value you can stop follwing them and the noise simply disappears. As a user, you’re already mining the twitter conversations based on people.

So what do mashups add? Using the twitter API, application developers can start filtering out the noise from the whole crowd to bring back only what is interesting to certain you. What’s your passion topic? People are already talking about it on twitter. You might not be following them, but those conversations are happening and the right mashup can bring them to you.

More value: this is real-time, anywhere

Twitter is all about what you’re doing, now. This data is as it happens - so trends, stories and opinions are breaking and evolving there. The web instriscally is linked to delivering content in a timely way, and twitter is the extreme of this.

This is local
This date is local - if you’re twittering from an iPhone you’re providing a location stamp on your potentially valuable conversation. Manipulating this data can add even more value. Now we’re getting killer - all of a sudden, we’ve got lots of location-based noise going on, but now we can filter out the noise and we’re left with valuable conversations and their locations.