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October 22, 2009 1:02 PM PDT

News Corp. digital chief: MySpace 'kind of stopped'

by Caroline McCarthy
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SAN FRANCISCO--With both MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta and News Corp. chief digital officer Jonathan Miller taking the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit this week, there was naturally plenty of talk about the social site's attempt to reverse its ill fortune of late. Once the biggest name in social networking, it's long since lost that title to Facebook and is trying to reinvent itself as a destination for music and entertainment.

"I think that what you see in the space more than anything else is if you don't keep innovating and moving forward you get in trouble," Miller said in his talk on Thursday morning. "You can't stop, you have to keep going, and (MySpace) didn't keep going, it kind of stopped."

And in that time, he added, "we had two fantastic competitors emerge in Facebook and Twitter."

The previous day, Van Natta made his first big appearance on the conference circuit since he joined MySpace and was tasked with a major turnaround. Van Natta unveiled a new music video hub as well as an enhanced set of marketing tools for music artists--some of which were built in with technology from iLike, which MySpace acquired this summer.

And on Wednesday night, the "new" MySpace was out in full form: a line snaked down three city blocks when music fans caught wind of the fact that the company had booked rock band Weezer for one of its "secret shows" concerts.

"MySpace started with an essence around certain things, and one of them was music, and meeting new people," Miller, a former AOL exec who also joined News Corp. this spring, said on Thursday. "We're going back to basics in that sense, but you've got to make it relevant to today and going forward."

It's obviously too early to tell whether the "reinvention" will work. Some critics say that it's too big of a task, especially given the state of the advertising market. But Miller spent a big portion of his talk at the Web 2.0 Summit hyping up the Fox Audience Network, or FAN, the digital advertising division that News Corp. first announced last spring.

"We kind of broke it out of MySpace and gave it a life of its own," Miller said. "We're just at the beginning of a coming-out party for FAN."

FAN just inked a deal with agency giant Omnicom, and more are on the way, he added. Miller also said FAN is the fifth-largest ad network on the Web, after the usual suspects--Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL--and that it's hoping to get into fourth place soon.

Caroline McCarthy, a CNET News staff writer, is a downtown Manhattanite happily addicted to social-media tools and restaurant blogs. Her pre-CNET resume includes interning at an IT security firm and brewing cappuccinos. E-mail Caroline.
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by codynews October 22, 2009 1:21 PM PDT
I moved over to facebook for one reason: The layout. I couldn't stand the pages being made by people on myspace. When I switched, most people I knew were still on Myspace. Now they're all on Facebook and I don't even use my myspace account ever.
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by Sausagebiscuit October 22, 2009 1:44 PM PDT
Ditto. Geocities anyone? :)
by Jamie_Foster October 22, 2009 1:28 PM PDT
These social networking sites all just a fad. First it was Friendster, then it was Live Journal, then Myspace, then Facebook now it Twitter. None of these outfits have ever made a profit and as soon as they start to plaster the site with ads people leave.
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by richard.watson October 23, 2009 1:15 AM PDT
Facebook is now cash-positive so it's in a different league to previous efforts. There's also something different about it - it's not just an ADD-fueled chat session. I know friends of mine whose parents are on it. They communicate with their families and share pics. It's become a way to keep in touch with old friends, schoolmates, etc. Enough problems are being solved that bolster the network effect. I'm pretty sure it'll be around in 10 years.

Put it this way - Google can't catch them, and believe me they're trying.
by Don Key October 22, 2009 1:29 PM PDT
Myspace's biggest problem is that they allowed every page to look like it was done by a 12 year old for way too long and didn't make privacy a priority.
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by EdCenter October 22, 2009 1:46 PM PDT
Well the ability to customize MySpace pages was what made it so popular in the first place. What killed it for me was all the spam I was getting and MySpace had no way of stopping it (at the time) other than to shut off all friend invites.
by Don Key October 22, 2009 4:33 PM PDT
That's fine, that people wanted their own pages to look like a clown threw up on them but for me viewing it... they never had the option for me to view them in a normal viewer. They do now, but it's way too late.

Once you lose in this kind of thing, you never get it back. Just ask Friendster.
by tektaktyks October 22, 2009 1:47 PM PDT
yea its dying ,big news...
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by terminalblue October 22, 2009 1:50 PM PDT
Ive said it before, i dont really like facebook's layout. My myspace has never been one of those travesties to HTML like most pages, but i prefer the ability to tinker with the layout the being stuck with the same formula that everyone else has.

There is nothing i enjoy about facebook, it has a bland homogenized feel, i just wished that myspace to unify its and execute a little more control over user content, but id still rather have an open environment to facebook's "walled garden".
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by badasscat October 22, 2009 2:27 PM PDT
Not sure you really know what "walled garden" means - both MySpace and Facebook are walled gardens.

The whole point of Facebook is to connect you with people, not "create an online identity", which is where MySpace's customizable html is supposed to come in. That's where MySpace and so many other social networking sites went off the rails. Facebook used to explicitly forbid you from creating a false identity online that was different than your real one. They now only actively discourage it, but the fact that 95% of the users there use their real ID's means there's tremendous peer pressure. And when you're using your real identity, there's no need to "advertise" yourself with funky layouts or graphics. Your friends like you for who you are.

MySpace was great at creating superficial relationships between people who didn't know each other. That's fine if your goal in life is to brag about how you have 500,000 MySpace friends. But most people are not like that. Most people just want to connect with their real life friends, and that's what Facebook is all about.
by hankthedwarf October 22, 2009 1:51 PM PDT
Unless they change the name of the site, it will never get back to where it was...nor will it hold its current ground. The name Myspace has become as passe as the name AOL became in the late 90s.

What's worse is that Myspace has the stigma of automatically bringing to mind annoying blinking animated gifs and being populated with teenagers who never passed a grammar course.

Change the name...the name is well known, but it's more infamy than fame.
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by t8 October 22, 2009 2:09 PM PDT
My Place? My Base? My Old Space?
by upuaut October 23, 2009 1:08 AM PDT
How about, it's a long name, but bear with me, MyBaseRbelong2Us.com ?
by Havoc70 October 22, 2009 2:49 PM PDT
My Space is pretty rank anyway, and with NewsCorp behind it, you know it has to be a joke.
Lets not forget that Newscorp wants to start charging for shows on Hulu, Horse s h i t, the minute they charge for the limited shows that are now free, Pffft no more customers.
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by HyraxX October 23, 2009 9:24 AM PDT
I would depending on the price. I can get a tv episode from amazon or itunes for $1-$2. So they would obvious have to price it along the lines of $5/month for unlimited usage.

I hate using ad hominem arguements, but are you suggesting we illegally watch the tv shows from other sources?
by danoja October 22, 2009 2:52 PM PDT
MySpace? Didn't realize they were sill in business.
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by October 22, 2009 3:18 PM PDT
I don't think it is any fault of their own or genius by Facebook or Twitter. I grew up in Manhattan and I have seen many restaurants and night clubs open for a while, have tremendous success, all the trendy people come there and then one day, they stop coming. I think we are seeing the internet as a bar.
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by JazMac2 October 23, 2009 6:36 AM PDT
Myspace is what Geocities was before it died and that business model simply doesn't work.. A place full of ads, popups, malware, bad behavior and hacker experiments. It also didn't help when people found out Fokkk news is now its new partner. Folks reacted the same way they did when they found out Rush Limbaugh wanted to own a football team.
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by Logotrope October 23, 2009 9:06 AM PDT
It's obvious that MySpace's number one problem is the junky interface--most personal pages are impossible to navigate, slow to load, and garishly ugly. At one point they were the leader in personal social networking. But one of the things Facebook did right--and kicked MySpace's ass in the process--was to force users to keep clean, consistent, easy-to-read pages.
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by ddhboy October 23, 2009 10:22 AM PDT
Myspace died because facebook appeared, and one day someone else will get their 15 minutes of social networking fame and kill facebook, that's just how things are. Will facebook ever be popular again? No, not really, once your site looses interests, that's pretty much it. its not like a TV station where there are a set number of competitors, and you can turn it around by putting on a new show. There are a countless number of sites on the internet, each competing against each other, and no company in the world will ever be able to keep its dominance forever.
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by solitare_pax October 23, 2009 10:24 AM PDT
Maybe the users found out it was connected to FOX News, and decided to jump ship.
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by The_Eskimo October 23, 2009 11:24 AM PDT
It's all cyclical...we'll be back to chat rooms before too long.
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by Allegory101 October 24, 2009 3:51 PM PDT
ahem...google wave anyone, will basically be a chatroom with instant everything.
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About The Social

CNET News' Caroline McCarthy is a downtown Manhattanite who believes that, despite popular opinion, the Web can actually help your social life. She's happily addicted to fun social-media tools from Twitter to Yelp to Facebook, sends an inordinate number of text messages, and has a tendency to waste time at the office reading restaurant blogs. Here, she explores all facets of the Web's gregarious side, as well as the unique tech culture in her home city of New York. (Don't call it Silicon Alley.)

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