a) Facebook opening up to more than college students and
b) myspace not adjusting to smartphones
Facebook was boring out the door. Blue and white. Real names. It only knew how to copy others – and copy poorly at that, something they keep doing. [Facebook reels = crippled tiktok, Groups = crippled forums, etc]
But its blandness and immediate internationalization gave it the kind of scope that white copier paper has: Something everybody can use and take for granted.
Meanwhile, MySpace could not adjust. It was great on PCs for teenagers and young adults but it didn’t have the global reach of Facebook nor the age range. Yes, there were grandmothers and grandfathers on MySpace but more of them took to Facebook which was more conservative and bland.
If they hadn’t wiped away all of the profiles and made a complete change to the horizontal slide format, they might have survived to fulfill a niche. But throwing the bulk of people’s profiles away was a huge error. Maybe they had to for technical reasons – the buggy self-coding areas of the site were impossible to control when it came to viruses and stuff – so maybe that’s a #3 — but socially it destroyed it. People wanted to personalize – a feature, oddly enough ,that Facebook completely lacked. Nobody reclaimed the level of personalization possible that MySpace did.
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