Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone, and welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Bollett and I am an editor here at how stuff works dot com. Sitting across from me as usual laughing because we just had an out pick. And senior writer Jonathan Strickland, you are a sad, strange little man. That was in fact the quote that I grabbed. And before we get
into this topic, we have a little listener me. This listen mail comes from Ben. Ben says, Hey, guys, love your podcasts. What happened to my Space? I'm new to social networking, but remember friends of mine talking about my Space and how cool it was for some time. Then overnight, almost literally, there's Facebook, this new thing and has been ever since. What is it that separates the two and
what is it that gives Facebook it's edge? Well, Ben, we're gonna talk a little bit about my Space, the history of it, what's happening with my Space now and kind of you know, it's sort of fall from grace really, yes, yes, As it turns out, Facebook is has housed in a giant cube in space and the people onboard are androids. That's no moon, that's a social networking site. You will be assimilated. Okay, no, none of that is true. No, no,
that's not true. But it does sort of seem like they popped up out of nowhere and took over and about the same time. Actually, my Space started back in two thousand three. Man, that's really old. Yeah, well at least in Internet terms. Internet terms of this pretty old. What's weird is that I sit there and I think about how long some of these things have been around, Like I feel like I've been using Twitter forever, and I think, wait a minute, it's been a little over
two years. That's it. Um. So with with my Space. It began as a for profit company back in two thousand three. And if you joined my Space back in the day, you might be familiar with Tom. He was your first friend on my Space. Yes, he was referred to Tom Anderson, one of the co founders of the of MySpace dot com. And um, Tom was the automatic first friend you had, and then you could search for
other friends using things like you know their email addresses? Yes, so you could look around and join um and uh, request friends with all the people you know, and then build up your network that way, same way as most
social networks work. Really, yes, I am and looking at the diagram we have on our now aging article on my Space, it reminds me of LinkedIn, Like you had circles of friends, you know you friends and friends of friends and friends and friends of friends, which really it looks just like what Zuckerberg would call the social when he steps up in front of like, you know, he he would have his own grid of showing the social
network and how your friends. You have a you have a circle of friends, and then they have their own circle of friends, some of which overlap your circle and
some which don't. And then what will be really what's really interesting is when you start finding connections between friends that you didn't know existed, Like you had you have a friend over here who's from your let's say baseball team, like you played baseball with them, and a friend over on the other side who was in um uh a class with you at a college that was across the country from where you played baseball, and yet these two
people are also friends with each other. And then you think, how the heck did that happen, And did you realize Wait a minute, I'm not the connecting point for these people. They knew each other before without independently of knowing me.
Small world, as they say. Yes, you know when you said a moment ago connections between friends you didn't even know existed, I thought, somehow you found out about my imaginary friends, and I was kind of go, how did you know a totally different social networking site, non space is what that was called. So my imaginary friendster? Yeah, oh well, and and Friendster was around. Actually, Friendster was the dominant social networking site back when my Space first arrived.
So my Space goes online around two thousand three, end of two thousand three, and Facebook pops up at the beginning of two thousand four, So that that was straight again there we go. That was Facebook popping and your your face has been booked, as they used to say in my head. So anyway, Facebook popped up in around two thousand four. And when Facebook first started it was limited to college students. It was later opened up to
high school students and college students. Actually, originally it was just Harvard students, but indeed Harvard then college, then high school then eventually everyone else. Well, there was a two year period where Facebook was not open to the public, yes, but my Space was. So my Space got a jump on Facebook on anyone who was not currently in school. I remember at this time I was out of school. I could not join Facebook when it first started because I no longer had a college email address, so I
created a profile on my Space. Many of my friends also created profiles on my Space, so my space got a pretty big jump early on. I got a lot of users. Um, and it had a different style from Facebook. Oh yes, it has a much different style from Facebook. As a matter of fact, one of the ways that I first became affiliated or I'm sorry, more aware of my space was I thought of it as a band site because b A N D not B A N N E D depends on where you work, but because
it was both in some instances. This is true um and probably still has but yeah, I mean it was. That was one of the things that I thought was really neat about my my spaces. Um. And for people in independent label bands like myself, Um, you could post samples of your music up, the whole songs and give people an opportunity to hear it and I actually thought, uh, initially, I thought that that's what the site was for, was for bands to put music up in musicians to work
with other musicians. Very prescient of you, Yes, as it turns up, but we'll get into that. Yes, but yeah, no, that was that. That was kind of funny because I thought it was specifically for that, and it had it. Definitely, my Space had a huge advantage over Facebook as far as sharing things like getting it discovering bands. Yes, my Space was superior to Facebook in that sense, even after Facebook went public, because Facebook groups were primitive compared to
my Space band pages. So on a band page you could find not just music, but also things like schedules and blog posts, photo albums, all that kind of stuff, just like any person's profile. That's the other thing is my Space allowed you to have a customizable profile page, which was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing in the sense of if you had some if you had really good design skills, you could create an attractive, easily readable my Space layout. You could even if you
wanted to. You could incorporate things like songs that you really liked. You could find songs on my Space and add them to your profile. Uh. Sadly, this usually resulted in auto play, which means meant that if you were visiting someone else's profile and they picked a song that you hated, uh, you know, it would suddenly start blasting out of your computer until you either muted it, muted your computer, or found the um the control on the profile page and and paused it. And because those pages
were customizable, the control was not always in the same spot. Yes, it became really irritating. Like you'd go to like, I have friends and I love them to death, but my god, they have terrible music. Terrible music, tastes horrible. Some of them don't even know who the Ramons were, that's how bad they were. Yeah, for a moment, I thought you were talking about me, but then I realized I know who the remon are, so it's probably not. No, not talking about you. I've listened to you play. Your band's
music was not. It did not make me want to go out on a rampage, all right, But some of my friends had music that did. Um Yeah, especially if they picked really irritating uh Internet songs. Like there was one person who had what was it the it was essentially the same people who did the hamster dance music. Oh, the the really high pitched stuff. It wasn't crazy Frog. That's it crazy Frog. Oh I Love you the Death Girl.
But man, that crazy Frog song on auto play just it was enough for me not to go and visit your profile. So anyway, the customizable profile was a blessing and a curse. It actually was something that it had that Friendster did not have, and that may have contributed to people adopting my Space over friendster Um. And again, because it was open to everyone, it wasn't just restricted to college students, it meant that my Space got a
lot of people pretty quickly. So I'm sorry you were about to say, I was just also going to add that apparently my Space was set up on a better platform, which also aided it over Friendster because friendster Um had difficulty with the amount of traffic it was getting. It grew very quickly, and it really kind of outgrew itself very quickly to the point where an alternative like my Space, which was which had the traffic disseminated over the company's
network more efficiently, was able to handle the load. And um, we all know on the Internet, people don't wait around once they're Even when their favorite site UH starts having difficulties or is completely reformat it in a way that makes it unpopular to use, people will bolt even from their most favorite sites, or at least about it at length.
Yes to anyone who will listen, because that's one of the things about Facebook is that it kept During this time, Facebook changed it's its user interface a couple of times, and each time it's it's the same today. Each time Facebook does that, uh, you could expect the next week to be filled with complaints about Facebook's new user interface, both on Facebook and also on Twitter. Yes, I particularly enjoy how it seems like of people are screaming about
the layout. Why did they put fill in the blank here? Over filling the blank there? Because they can't find the thing. And then there's always one person. There's always one, or it could be more, but there's always one of goes, I don't know, I don't think it's that bad. I'm usually the one who says I can't I don't think it's that bad. Here's the thing is that by the following month, everyone's forgotten about it, and then the next change becomes the one that you're like, oh, seriously, this
is terrible. I can't believe you did this. And you're like, wait a minute. You hated these changes back when they made them like three months ago. Why is it now the best thing ever? And you hate new changes because we're people, well friends. Store was was just hard, outright hard to use at that point, and my Space was there. Facebook was still restricted to a certain group. So my Space took off and it was a very popular site
for a very very long time. It'll let you create photo albums, that let you create a blog on your MySpace profile. You could leave messages for other people. Eventually you could chat with other people through an instant messaging on on the MySpace platform. Of course, they also had to be a logged into my Space at that time for the chat to work, but you could leave messages if they weren't. Um. So, I mean, there's a lot of the functionality that we later saw built into other
social networking sites. And uh, it was doing really well, in fact, so well that in two thousand five another company swooped in and um and paid a pretty penny for MySpace dot com. Yes more than a pretty penny. Actually, it was Intermix, the company that owned my Space. Um. They were acquired by a little known magnet from Australia. Yes, Mr Murdock, Rupert Murdock, scourge of the Internet. Yeah, Rupert Murdoch.
Who who who probably has lost more money and and won it back again than I will ever see in my entire life. Um. His his, His company Newscore purchased MySpace dot Com in two thousand five for five hundred
eighty million dollars. It's million with an M. Yes. Um. Interestingly enough, I went back to look at the coverage at that time because I've thought of my space is being synonymous with Fox and News Corps for so long that I was I was trying to get a sense of what happened and when it happened and how much it was. And it was funny because the coverage at the time said that news Corps had acquired Intermix theoretically to gain my Space. So it's funny because I think
of it specifically in those terms. But um, there were other technologies that that Intermix had that were not nearly the newsmaker that that my Space was. I would say, I think it's safe to say that my Space was definitely the crown jewel of the acquisition for news corp. And they thought it was going to make them a whole lot of money. Well, at the time, my Space was incredibly successful. There was no sign that that was
going to change at all. Yes, as far as anyone could tell, my Space was just going to keep on growing. It was going to be a monster and see double digit growth each year and um, and this was two thousand five. Two thousand six is what I think the event that eventually reverse the fortunes of MySpace dot com. Right, Well, I think before we go on to that, sure we should add that my Space you know, talking about the growth and you're saying, okay, so what does maybe what
does the growth mean? You know, Okay, so they've got lots of people, they're growing at a very very rapid pace. Well, they were making their money off of advertising. So the more people that visit your site, um and click on advertising, the more money the site makes. So news Corpus looking at this is an opportunity for advertising dollars and that's important. I think it will be important because of the two thousand six part. Yeah, because clearly the thing that you're
advertising relies upon is heavy traffic. Yes, the heavier of the traffic, the more money you make. If the traffic starts to slack off, then you don't make as much money. And if the traffic lacks off enough, you start to lose money. Right. So that's that's that was their income stream, right And Murdoch is known for having pretty um concrete ideas of how profitable a business needs to be in order for it to be worthwhile. We didn't get to be successful as successful as he is by not having
any business acumen. He is certainly not a charity. Um. He is in the business of making money and he's very very good at it. Yes. So anyway, that's that no one could have seen in two thousand five necessarily that my Space was going to be headed for a reversal unfortune. However, in two thousand and six, that's when Zuckerberg and crew opened up Facebook to the general public. Yes, and of course traffic took off at that point because Facebook was an alternative to my Space. People wanted to
see what it was about. They tried it out, they liked it. Also, they had a lot of young folks on Facebook at that point, because you had people who were either either you know, in high school just getting into college, or maybe you have just graduated from college, but they had created a profile back when they were in college. So uh so you have this young, dynamic audience that's already built into your social network. There were also some stories in the news about um about predators
on my Space. There was it actually became kind of prevalent. In fact, my Space rightly or wrongly, began to develop a reputation as being a wretched hive of scum and villainy if you were um It's I'm not saying that that reputation was actually earned, but it certainly had it.
You know, I remember people saying, like I remember seeing news interviews where kids were saying they preferred Facebook over my Space because my Space was where all the sleazy people were, the people you don't want to have contact with, strangers who uh would try and befriend you, and it was just creepy and Facebook was the friendly site. Well I will I will say this. Another thing that that my Space had that really bugged me was um I. When I first signed up for a MySpace account, UM
I did have Tom as a friend. I also had solicitations from all kinds of spammers almost immediately, not immediately, but very close to it, and it it didn't seem what I like, what I was doing with my settings affected any of it. So eventually got fed up and left because my Space hadn't really gotten a grip on that.
It seems that I have since started a newer account on my Space, I don't really use it for anything other than to keep up with a couple of friends that I only know we're on my space, and um, you know it's it's set as private as it will go. And no, I have not gotten anything from anybody, including the friends I tried to keep up with. Very sorry,
so two thousand and six. Facebook was public in two thousand eight and or two thousand nine, depending upon whom you consult, Facebook overtakes my Space in traffic, yes, so keep in mind my Space had an enormous head start did but Facebook is growing faster than my spaces and in fact, in some quarters, my Space is posting a
loss in total number of visitors. So there was a point where Facebook was just growing faster, like both companies were growing, but Facebook was growing leaps and bounds ahead of my Space, and then eventually Facebook continued to grow and my Space stopped growing, and a VEC started to to lose members as people just let their accounts die, kind of like Pullett did. Um, I I can tell you so two thousand eight is where we see the
Facebook start to take the lead. Two thousand eight, coincidentally is the year where I received my last message from a friend on my Space. I logged into my account to check and the last time I received a message from someone I actually know, as opposed to some random update from a group that I belonged to, it was two thousand eight. Well. Um. On a recent article on cnet from one of my favorites net writers don Rie Singer Um, they noted that currently here in my Space
still has more than a hundred million users worldwide. However, Facebook has more than five hundred million active users and Twitter has about a hundred seventy five million registered users registered, meaning all those people and that includes all those people that got on Twitter, posted one tweet and left and never came back. Still, that's a lot of users compared to my Space, especially with Twitter is a fledgling service compared to my Space, fledgling because Twitter, I see where
what you did there? Um, so yes, they won't hear another so that that that is the uh that sort of brings us to where we are now, because two things have happened recently that have put my Space back in the news. One is the redesign. Yeah, my Space is undergoing a massive redesign, and in fact, they're kind of positioning themselves as no longer being a social networking site. Yes, they're going to be partnering with sites like Facebook, which you know, that's kind of weird. Yeah, a couple of
years ago would have been unthinkable. But they instead they're positioning themselves as a social entertainment site. So it's going to be kind of a portal in a way for various uh forms of entertainment. We're talking about music, movies, television, that kind of thing. Actually, the company competitor that immediately came to mind was not Facebook in that case, but Yahoo. Yeah, because that's what Yahoo does so well, serve as a
portal for that kind of material. Yeah. Who yeah, Who's kind of transitioned from being a search engine to a uh content portal. Yes, So the same sort of thing with MySpace. It looks like it's going to specifically be stuff like music videos and uh movies, television that kind of thing. And there still will be social elements at play, and you will still be able to have a social profile on MySpace, but the focus will no longer be on the profile page. It will be on these these
pages about various kinds of entertainment. Um. I have not received this new version of my Space as of the recording of this podcast. They're rolling it out gradually in blocks, and I still have the old profile based MySpace. Yes, I do as well. Um, they are supposed to be getting it out to everyone by the end of November. Yeah, and that's when we're recording this is the is early November, so we will probably, I'm sure we will go back to our desks and it will be there by the
time that we finish. Very well, may have access to it. But so we can't really talk from a personal perspective what this new redesign is really going to do and whether whether or not it will be enough to keep my Space going after all the hits it's taken over the last couple of years. And I think that kind of brings us to the other item in the news that has uh brought my Space into focus again. Yes, now going back to my earlier comment on my Space
relying so heavily on advertising. Facebook also uses advertising, but they have One of the things that my Space had to work to emulate was Facebook's ability to integrate things like games. Uh. You know, Facebook is something of a games destination, casual gaming destination for many many people. Of course, it made Zinga a very very uh um well, I'm trying to say, trying to think of the word I
want to use here. Well, successful, yes, but I mean that they're worth you would imagine not releasing you know, uh, console games or PC games, but they really launched them into being a very uh uh high value company from Facebook alone, which which apparently if you had said that backward Facebook first released the the a p I, you would have said, what, No, there's no way. I mean, this is an interesting tool for developers, but there's no way you would ever really make money off it unless
you were selling people's information to advertisers. Because it turns out that's not entirely true. Yeah, and my Space, my space is model just wasn't keeping up with Facebook's ability to use that information and build on that. So Facebook has sort of outpaced it in worth as well, which is made Mr. Murdoch a very unhappy man and he's not the only one. So the The News Corps President and chief operating Officer Chase Kerry was recently quoted as saying,
we've been clear that my Space is a problem. That's not something you want to hear if you're working at my Space. Yeah, yeah, you don't want to hear that your company is a problem. So we need to redefine and rebuild this business. We've made adjustments in the costs, sure, and most importantly in the last few weeks, we have relaunched my Space with a focus on social entertainment, which is what we were talking about just a second ago. Um. But he further went on to say current losses are
not acceptable or sustainable. That's also bad news. Our current management did not create these losses, but they know we have to address them. And as long as we know where the blame lies, well he says, they didn't create them, So it's the previous the previous uh management, not the current management. Yeah, it's ah, that's those are some harsh words. And and my Space has famously had some pretty big rounds of layoffs over the last couple of years well,
as Risinger said Uh, I'm quoting him. He said, carry said that my space is time is running out, so they do not It's not just that they see, uh the losses is not being sustainable. What he's saying is if we don't fin this soon, it means that we're not going to have a site. Yeah, add revenue analyst E Marketer released a report saying that my Space is ad revenue is expected to drop to two hundred ninety
seven million dollars in eleven. But back in two thousand nine it was earning four hundred seventy million dollars, So not quite a fifty drop in two years, but that's significant. I mean, going from four seventy million to two seven million in two years is not good. So yeah, my Space has got to He's got an uphill battle to fight.
So assuming that this relaunch actually captivates some some interest and perhaps the you know, marrying it so that it works with Facebook as opposed to competing against Facebook, that might that might be enough to help save it. Um, We'll have to wait and see, because uh, I think I think a lot of people just you know, they don't even my Space is not even in their mind space anymore. Yeah, there's no mind share. If you like
that term, I don't, but I'll use it. Yes. Well, a phrase that it has gone around a lot, at least in the United States during the economic downturn of the last few years is the too big to fail. And I think there's probably no such thing for Internet sites that's too big to fail. My Space would have been one of those things. Facebook to Facebook right now, you would think it's too big to fail. But if you know, if the story of my my Space has had anything to go by, it's you know. The lesson
there is that you can't rest on your laurels. You know, you can't. You can't ignore competition, and you can't just assume that the model that's working today is going to work tomorrow. You'll always have to be innovating and ready to move once things start to shift. Um, which sounds exhausting to me. Well, yes, I'm sure. Well, you know, the stuff I've read about the new MySpace design seems fairly positive. Most of what I see as well, it's very nice. But is it too late? Um? You know,
it may not be. Uh. And it also maybe that News Corp Is able to leverage it's new asset it's redesigned MySpace in a smaller capacity and gradually build it
back up to what it once was. But but yeah, I think it's it's it's going to have to overcome a lot of the bad publicity, a lot of the bad press over the past few years, and a lot of the momentum on the side of Facebook because people like That's one of the things that Facebook has done so well in integrating the other other websites, um, you know,
making a like feature available on other websites. You go to a um, you know, a news site, you find an article that you think is interesting, and you, you know, press the button on the site. Well, you know, that's the big blue button that people are getting used to a lot of cases there is a MySpace button, but now you know, it's who's who's clicking that besides the people who wrote the article. So um nice, but hey,
I do it. I do it for Facebook. So you know, it's just gonna have to overcome that that thing where you know, people are going to the hub, and the hub right now is Facebook. Here's here's one way I can see it. Follow me with this one. I'm following, all right. So Newscore owns my Space. Yes, Newscore owns Fox. Yes.
What if they did a two pronged attack where they very aggressively attacked any unauthorized videos from Fox Networks on any other site including YouTube, Yeah, but had authorized versions on my Space and allowed you to link to those versions on your Facebook account. Glee could save my Space. Um, you know what, that is the kind of thing that a shrewd business person would probably take to heart and go after. We knew somebody who let me give you
the address to which you can write to the big check. Well, considering he wants to put the Wall Street Journal back behind a paywall, I'm sure he's already thought of it. But um, but just in case that address is I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding, all right, then, So let's wrap this up. Will it survive? Um, probably at least for the the immediate time now, you know, my space is as we alluded to earlier, they're looking at time
now in quarters, not years. So it could be interesting to see if news Corp. Would actually sell off the asset to someone else, Because I don't I don't foresee this becoming like an issue with Cool where they just pull the plug one day and there's no longer on MySpace. No that those uh, those subscribers are valuable assets still, so they may sell it off to someone else. I
wonder who might purchase that. I would hope it wouldn't be Google, because they've pretty much demonstrated that the social networking thing and Google don't work so well, at least on the United States. Actually, the Purple guys that I mentioned earlier would be a good no. I mean that we're all This is a wouldn't surprise me if Facebook
did it. Yeah, Facebook purchasing MySpace so that it would have the access to the social entertainment I mean because still to this day, the MySpace band page is I would say, if not superior, at least equal to Facebook groups that are formed around bands fair enough, and of
course friend Feed another acquisition by Facebook. They've pretty much almost left it alone and I haven't seen a big change that some of the technology into Facebook though, right, But they've kind of left it alone and left it its own site. So they might have they might leave my Space and independent in sight even if they did acquire it, But I don't know. They may. It's hard to say at this point because it's still a viable property. I think News Corps still hopes to get something out
of it if they can. I'm wondering if one of us will make a prediction about my Space at the end of the year. Well, you know, that's the thing is that we're recording this in the early November, which means pretty soon we are going to have to record our Technology Predictions episode eleven. It also means we'll have to go through the predictions episode we did for twenty ten and see how many we got completely wrong. I'm not letting you have access to the scoreboard this time. No,
I'll get an impartial judge. It'll be it'll be my friend Juan Stricklando. Okay, anyway, let's wrap this up. If you guys have a topic you would like us to tackle, you can let us know one this is gonna sound bad. Twitter or Facebook. Not my Space because we aren't there, but Twitter and Facebook you can fight us. Our handle is tech dot HSW or you can email us and that address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com and we will talk to you again really soon.
Jonathan Um, Actually this was just handed to me. It looks like how stuff works dot Com now has an iPhone app. Sweet, that's awesome. Yeah, actually, um, I got to to take a look at this earlier, and guys, this is pretty cool. The iPhone app is sort of a way to integrate all the cool stuff we do at how stuff Works dot com. So you, guys may have listened to one of our podcasts and we talked about there's this great article on the site, but you're
not at your computer, so you can't really check it. Well. The iPhone app actually lets you browse articles and blog posts, even lets you interact on Facebook and Twitter, and you can listen to podcasts at the same time. And it has all the how stuff Works dot Com podcasts on it, not just ours, but you know good ones too, so you can listen to those and look at the articles and and go on Facebook and Twitter. And it's should work perfectly with your iPhones and iPod touches. Awesome. What's
it looks like. It's now available on the iTunes Store, so that's good to know. How much does it cost? It's freeze Ah, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you