Longing for the day ...

The slow decay of MySpace?

Just read an interesting but revealing article about the different fortunes of MySpace and Facebook. Now, the article is framed as a discussion of how the two sites compare from the point of view of growth and total numbers, but there was another figure the writer ignored that is very revealing indeed.

The article lists the unique visitation of MySpace in July 2007 as 61.3 million, which sounds pretty impressive, especially when you consider that it's up 33.3% on last year. Great! But when I logged on this morning, my "Network" was 197,539,132 - more than three times the number of unique visitors. Even allowing for rounding of that network down to, say 180 million, that still means that 2/3 of account holders don't visit MySpace each month!

For a site whose purpose is social networking, I'd say that's pretty sick ... especially when you consider that I, personally, have three MySpace accounts and I know I'm not the only one.

I'm going to launch a campaign called "MythSpace" to combat the excessive hype that News Limited has generated around this site. I don't have a problem with the site, its purpose or its members (I'm one of them). It just pisses me when the hype is uncritically thrown about and people like Uncle Rupert make truckloads of money out of other people's dreams and aspirations .... watch out for the MythSpace logo when I get my ftp program back up and running ...