From Popular to Irrelevant

To Evolve is to stay Relevant

  Myspace was founded in 2003 and was one of the top visited sites in the world, and at a point in 2006, their site views actually surpassed Google's. They had 100Million users in 2006 and was valued at over 10Billion dollars. So what exactly happened to Myspace? with such amazing statistics in 2006, what could have possibly gone wrong?

In the year of 2006 I was a freshmen in high school, my life consisted of school, friends and Myspace. Now seven years later, I don't even remember my password, or even the email I used for my account. How does this website that consumed my life be so irrelevant to me right now? well, I (and everyone else) outgrew Myspace. I believe that Myspace lost their users because of their lack of innovation. Myspace constantly stayed the same. They rarely updated their designs, look, and features, which are all of the necessary things to keep a social network exciting and most important current. After their dramatic downfall, Myspace has tried to reinvent themselves from social networking site to entertainment networking site. Their site is now focused on the music/entertainment industry, where professional and amateur artists can showcase their talent. This 'reinvention' did not help Myspace get back in the competition, take a look at their stats on Alexa:

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 Unlike Myspace, facebook is evolving and is staying as up-to-date as possible with the fast changing technological devices. They even came out with a phone! (It was a major FLOP but hey I give them credit for thinking outside the box)  I believe that Facebook is taking a smarter approach than Myspace did. Facebook is constantly finding new ways to stay relevant to what's going on in the internet world. When "apps" came out for smart phones and tablets, Facebook created an app for profiles and for messaging, when skype usage became more popular, they integrated skype video calls allowing users to make skype calls on facebook, and also integrated the use of hasthags ( originally from twitter). Besides staying up-to-date with technological devices, Facebook has also broadened their audience from college students, to young kids and adults. They started out as a college social network, where only college students who had a valid university email address were able to use the site, and now anyone, and a great percentage of the population of the world, uses it.

Maybe there will come a time when Facebook will go through a downfall (I honestly think it's inevitable with the fast changing social and electronic world), but I don't think that it will happen within the next five years. Facebook has become a part of a lot of peoples' lives, and even though I don't use it as much as I used to, I still find myself going back to it at least twice a week to check on friends and family from around the world.

  “Look around you. Everything changes. Everything on this earth is in a continuous state of evolving, refining, improving, adapting, enhancing…changing. You were not put on this earth to remain stagnant.”
― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

This blog is in response to Anthony Miyazaki's blog "Will Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tumblr Really Matter Five Years from Now?"

Sources: 

Western Journalism, . "There’s no more room: the decline of MySpace." Web. <http://westernjournalism.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/theres-no-more-room-the-decline-of-myspace/>.

 Web. <http://www.internetworldstats.com/facebook.htm >.