GeekPolice Tech

Seems "Tom" was everybody's friend. Always the first friend due to child safety issues. It was the assurance that children's profiles were being watched. Now, that has changed with MySpace Today taking that place.

It seems Tom, better known as Thomas Anderson - co-founder of MySpace, has not logged in to his self-MySpace account since the end of January, and has not posted a status update since Christmas.

What is the big deal with this? Does that mean Tom has been replaced? No. But, instead of being President, Tom is now the Strategic Adviser.



What do Strategic Advisers do? They give advice on the spot, provide focus for the company, create options, and are the highest leaders.

Just being a Strategic Adviser seems like a low-blow to me. It is honorable that he is the co-founder, but he should at least be the chairman of the company, right?

It is bad enough that MySpace has dropped out of the top ten for several months now, update recently at spot 17 shows that MySpace is losing much popularity, compared to its rivals Twitter and Facebook. Even LinkedIn is showing a much better growth rate.

With MySpace slipping through the cracks of the rock bottom...OK not that far, but still...Owen Van Natta - former CEO - stepped down recently and gave his position to new co-presidents Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhor.

With MySpace's decline in GROWTH, does not mean that current users have QUIT. There are still well over 200 million users. But, the number of unique visitors per month has decreased from an estimate 65 million to 55 million in just 6 months. It is time to reverse that, if MySpace wants to stay alive as a highly popular website. What considers a website highly popular? If they are in the top 100.

There are still tons of MySpace users that will not convert to Facebook because of opinions such as "I don't like it" or "It sucks." But, that does not affect the conversion rate, because many Facebook users did not come from MySpace, but were unique new signups. That means that Facebook is attracting more attention from its global media rather than just the media talking about how good it is.

Facebook lately, however has lost some attention, because of GUI changes and privacy policy changes. Seems like both types of changes have been continual over the past year, with the privacy policy and GUI changing more than 2 times. Which is why many MySpace users are happy to stay home at MySpace.

Does the future hold poison for MySpace, or will MySpace beat the bad stuff in to burial and become a tough competitor to Facebook once again?

------------

DragonMaster Jay