Wrong: Cody Brown
(first: I don’t know Cody, nor is this intended as a personal attack on him. He is probably a very smart person, much smarter than myself. This is simply a counter-argument to his stance on Twitter)
In Cody Brown’s blog post “Myspace is to Facebook as Twitter is to ________” he force fits an anecdote “Scale is Everything” to fit his personal belief that Twitter will fall the way of MySpace. The problem is that he doesn’t even get why MySpace fell apart, more or less where Twitter’s weak points are (I’ll give you a hint, RSS is not one of them).
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How Cody Is Wrong: Point 1
Cody: MySpace failed due to segmented user groups and the inability to maintain a 3 front war (social networking-facebook, music-lastfm, entertainment-blogging)
Reality: MySpace failed due to an atrocious user experience.
The problem with MySpace has nothing to do with the fact that it’s user groups are segmented. In fact, when given the choice people prefer to get their whole experience in one place (just ask the Walton family). The problem is when that experience is lackluster, then people look for anything as an improvement over what’s annoying them.
MySpace let it’s users create their own pages from scratch. Which meant horrid color combinations, flashing backgrounds, auto-start music and videos, giant page sizes causing often minute long load times. You’d wince as you clicked to each new page, unsure of what terrors laid before you. MySpace’s problem is they have absolutely no control over the user experience, they let the animals run the zoo. The question shouldn’t be, why did MySpace die? It really should be, how did MySpace last this long?
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How Cody Is Wrong: Point 2
Cody: Facebook became what it is because Zuck started with a small group and through incremental evolution ended up with a broad-appealing product.
Reality: Facebook became what it is because Zuck started with a walled garden, let buzz reach a breaking point in that garden, then tore down the walls.
This difference while subtle, is vitally important. Facebook didn’t become a world-wide phenom due to it’s gradual evolution. What made facebook so cool at its inception is that it was only for college students, and only a couple colleges had it. This created a walled garden within a walled garden. First you couldn’t join unless you were in college, and even if you were in, you had to be in the select few ivy league schools to get it.
Then, instead of opening up to all colleges at once, Zuck started opening up to colleges one by one. It became such a big deal when your college finally was added to facebook I remember it actually interrupted one of our lectures when someone in class realized that we could sign-up. This created a buzz in the college community. And it bred a feeling of ownership to this service. It was ours, not our parents and not those high school kids.
Well you can imagine that buzz grew more and more as people outside the college community heard about it (probably those just outside the walls- recent grads and seniors in high school) and wanted to join in on the fun. This buzz kept growing and growing at a frenzied pace as more and more blogs and companies talked about Facebook. Then, one day, they opened the doors for everyone. At that very same time MySpace was dealing with news about nude pictures of high school students, and peodphiles. MySpace didn’t stand a chance.
I guess if you want to boil this down even further you can say that Facebook won because it was easier to use, easier on the eyes, and got all the cool kids on board.
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How Cody Is Wrong: Point 3
Cody: MySpace was popular for a use they didn’t anticipate, and they failed. Twitter is also popular for a use they didn’t anticipate. Therefore they will fail.
Reality: That’s a hasty generalization there sir.
Ask any successful startup founder, your first idea is never the one you end up with. And how you imagine users to play with your application is almost never how it’s used in actuality.
Do me a favor. Read up on the creation of Flickr, PayPal, The Internet, Viagra. Did any of these founders anticipate how their products would eventually be used? Not a chance.
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How Cody Is Wrong: Point 4
Cody: Twitter will eventually be replaced by multiple service providers much the same way MySpace was. One being a product with minimal centralization (RSSCloud for example), the other will be centralized but better organized.
Reality: Your Retarded.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume Cody means that for our individual twitterers and tweets we’d be using the decentralized RSSCloud (or similar) service. This would allow content creators to keep their data and use it however they’d like. Allowing different apps/readers, as well as different ways to display the tweet-equivalents. Then the centralized product would be for news organizations, as a method of making it easier for us to find legitimate news from legitimate sources.
First, decentralization will never happen. The reason is simple. Why would anyone want to join a decentralized group? Name one incentive for Oprah, Ellen, Shaq, Ashton or anyone else to move from Twitter to a decentralized source? Exactly. The only way Twitter loses ground for our daily conversation is if they restrict their usage in any way. That catastrophically bad idea aside, decentralization can’t kill Twitter. Only Twitter can kill Twitter.
Oh and the idea that a product with better organization is going to take down Twitter is laughable. The more likely scenario is that someone will come up with a way to better organize and display Twitter’s pipe and become the next TweetDeck.
Face it, Twitter is the only source of micro-blogging. Not only that, it still has a long way to grow. Twitter may eventually be overtaken, but not while it’s still surging forward like this.
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The answer to your question is, this: MySpace is to Facebook as RSS is to Twitter. (fixed your question).
