MySpace is likely to be bigger and more influential than the blogosphere

Category myspace, internet, people | Permalink | 29. March 2007

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This weekend I took some time off from the Web 2.0 echo-chamber to explore some more mainstream social software. My conclusions? MySpace is likely to be bigger and more influential than the blogosphere within a matter of months (if it isn’t already).

Now this is all pretty intuitive and I probably don’t need to explain it - simply put, the youth demographic consists of extremely sociable early adopters who remain constantly connected via cellphones and the Internet.*

I see the potential here, more than anywhere else (including the blogosphere), for strong network effects. I think it’s fair to say that MySpace was at least partially responsible for YouTube’s exponential growth, for instance.

What’s also interesting about MySpace is that despite being a centralized site, it’s showing many characteristics of the decentralized web. Last week, for instance, I asserted that there are two strong models for Web 2.0: specialists and aggregators. In other words: you can build a service that does one thing well, or you can tie together a number of these specialized services. What you can’t do is build it all in-house (the “everything under one roof” strategy). Interestingly, MySpace has ignored the rules completely, instead attempting to launch its own video service. It’s no surprise that this me-too version is inferior to YouTube. Likewise, we see MySpace users hosting their photos with Imageshack and PhotoBucket. Would it be better for MySpace to host these images? Not likely. In many ways, MySpace still doesn’t understand that it’s an aggregator, not a portal.

MySpace is a fascinating social experiment and investors, entrepreneurs and bloggers should pay close attention. I’m watching this space very carefully.

*On a similar topic, ask yourself why Digg is one of the most popular Web 2.0 sites around.

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