Another article for PC Plus magazine (issue 285) that asks whether the age of MySpace is over and if Facebook has peaked? Is the social networking bubble about to burst? Or maybe the party has just moved on to Twitter…
When Rupert Murdoch handed over $580 million of News Corp’s money to buy MySpace in 2005, it seemed like a visionary deal. MySpace was an Internet success story, bravely mashing together blogging, messaging, photos, audio and video into hackable pop culture home pages.
Wired called MySpace a “nonstop global block party of music, video, and hookups”. And everybody was invited…
Three-quarters of the UK’s online population are believed to have a social network profile. Most spend a significant chunk of their time online and check their profiles (for new status updates, messages, trends, games, pointless quizzes or shared multimedia files) at least once a day.
While Facebook claims 200 million users worldwide, MySpace still boasts 130 million. That’s still huge by anyone’s standards. In some respects, the challenge for MySpace isn’t so much gaining new users, but retaining their attention.
The full article appears in PC Plus, issue 285.
