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Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace

This succinctly explains why MySpace has become a phenomenon, even with a crappy design. It also explains why all the tags, AJAX, RSS, and web standards in the world won’t save the deluge of new single-service startups coming on the scene.

Each site wants my contribution, but none give me a “home.” Flickr lets me post pictures, but not podcast. Epinions lets me review a CD, but not blog. MySpace lets me blog, but not post pictures like Flickr. Each does it’s thing, and I have to synchronize avatars, friend links, etc.

MySpace’s success is in having a critical mass of popular services (if baseline in quality). But, ultimately, they’re just a glorified portal. All portals share the same fate: as they grow, they can’t launch services fast enough to compete with creative startups. Instead, they tread water with meager enhancements, sustained by Metcalfian Value until users find the next “cool” spot on the Internets.

Microsoft is learning this lesson with IE, and recent Vista news does not bode well for their OS product. Google has been good at keeping its chin above water, but its shift from in-house innovation to random acquisitions is not a good sign.

The smart company doesn’t create the services, they provide the platform that the little guys build on. The old Microsoft knew this. Google knew this when it released its mapping and search APIs and GBase, but isn’t wholeheartedly committed.

MySpace would do well to follow that tradition. Instead of trying to be all things to all people, it should focus on enabling a trail of other companies to contribute integrated services and bandwidth. Rather than their own crummy Flickr clone, they should be working with Flickr to integrate services and ad-sharing. Instead of writing their own cheezy IM client, they should create a Jabber authentication back-end, contribute to GAIM, and call it a day.

Build it and they will come, but then they will get bored. Leave the tools lying around and they’ll build it themselves.

Update: A few hours after I posted this, MySpace made it clear that it’s really TheirSpace by deleting 200,000 profiles with “objectionable” content. Once again, people learn that when someone else owns the space, you have no right to free expression.