MySpace Case Review

Question 1 Does Facebook pose a substantial threat to MySpace?

Facebook has been posing threat on MySpace from the first day it entered the competition battleground of social networking. Although MySpace founded a year earlier than Facebook but lack of innovation makes it change from a market leader to a market follower for several reasons. Although MySpace users have reached to almost 100 million users worldwide, but only 45% of the IDs are reported active within a month. Besides this the unique visitor s number of Facebook is incrsing steadily since it has launched as we can see from the graph :( “Unique visitor” is a metric to measure no matter how many times people visit a site in a given month that only count once.)

Facebook differentiate itself from Myspace for several aspects which caused this severe threat to Myspace. For one Facebook provides more security and privacy for user’s personal information. An employee of Facebooks security team said, “if we get a report of a bug or a hole from a user, a security researcher, a reporter, blogger, or anyone, we check it out and fix it as quickly as possible.” Facebook allows members to restrict who they want to have access to their profile. MySpace has put itself in risking situations by not restricting access to profiles. Moreover than that , the filtering process of adults from teenagers is weak, which has lead to several incidences of sex-maniacs' attack on youngsters.
Since Facebook has a good at filtering the users ‘the quality of the web site also built up successfully which attracted many "on campus" (the most creative and active demographics on the internet in terms of content creativity and speed)students who had access to the internet. Parents of those cyber bully victims favored to facebook as it is the role model accumulation of schools they would like to send their kids to. Facebook guaranteed their user identity by adding features like identifying a person on photos spread over different profile photo folders.
Unlike MySpace, facebook uses easily recognizable, "eye friendly", standard profile layout without customization option of the profile cosmetics. This is also related to quality of the web site as well as the web site users. MySpace attracted youngsters through the ability of high customization of the profile interface. Since facebook was in business of more "mature" social gathering, google like interface attracted majority of the internet surfers. However although Facebook sound like to be ordinary, the team of management come over this problem through attractive applications written by those who are interested in software development, but lack large audience with standard platform for the application to be tested. On the other hand, MySpace needs to find a way to compete with Facebooks Platform that has introduced thousands of different applications. Since launching its application platform, Facebook attention has grown over 50%.
To sum up; Facebook deserve where it’s today for several reasons mentioned above and furthermore : easy entry, exit, all you can eat application revenue generation through ads, sponsorships, or even selling merchandise, quick response rate, feedbacks enabled by up to date metrics by facebook attracted more and more developers. As a result of all these basis on April 19, 2008, Facebook overtook MySpace as a social networking site leader. And Facebook now ranks number five, being ahead of MySpace, which ranks number six. Overall, Facebook not only pose threats to MySpace but successfully overpass.

Question 2. Should MySpace join operations or invest in its own developer platform?

It is obvious that Myspace has to find a way to reserve its current status and quantities’ data. Although join Google’s developer platform, OpenSocial, may bring more traffic and match Facebook functions quickly without investing in more resources, as it is mentioned in the case that developing its own proprietary software platform would enable MySpace to differentiate itself from competing websites like Hi5, Friendster. If MySpace launches its own developer platform it can control all the operations to be launched in a timely way and to directly obtain profits. With its own platform MySpace could also apply its own unique strategy and continue updating and adding additional value to its users.So Myspace can accelerate it s popularity and quality by new services, only by those who offer completely different value creation, and proposition on social networking.As an update in February 2008 MySpace launched a developer platform utilizing OpenSocial and opened up its platform to third-party application developers.