One of the biggest knocks against MySpace — especially from me — was that the design of the profile pages was just too busy. Too much color, flashing boxes, music and spam.

I never even made a profile on MySpace because I never saw the need to enter that public online chaos. Technically, Facebook tricked me into joining by offering me a walled social sanctuary of fellow college students first…before snapping it away and throwing applications all over the place.

Accessing a friend’s profile took too long to load, and finding any info about the person on the page was like playing Mindsweeper if every box in the game flashed: DESIGN BY RaNdOmTxTLinX FLASH FLASH FLASH!

Now that MySpace is launching a redesign of the site to better organize it for function and advertising, are they admitting to Facebook that “the book” had the right idea all along?

Yup.

In changing up the look of the site, MySpace is saying: “We give up. You did better.”

To its credit, MySpace was first, the pioneer of modern social networking — well, besides Friendster. Facebook benefited from watching MySpace grow. Mark Zuckerberg saw where they encountered problems and where users desired more privacy and closed systems. When Facebook finally went up, they expanded slowly, college by college. This timed expansion gave them a chance to test and adapt. Of course, Facebook looked and navigated better when it hit the mainstream, and privacy features were there from the start.

While Facebook launched new advertising programs — even if they weren’t all successful — and brought businesses into its network by opening doors with applications and pages and allowing others outside of college to join, MySpace never really saw the advertising boom they expected.

Why?

Well, everything on MySpace looks like an ad, and I don’t want to click any of it. Why would a business want to throw their logo into the middle of a sea of logos, plagued with problems of privacy and illicit behavior?

The end result of Facebook’s hightened buzz and Microsoft deal was that MySpace has had to go on the hunt as the underdog. They have revised their strategy, and they are going after the application developers that Facebook loves so much.

With a redesign, they admit their biggest flaw and make Facebook look like a champ, but MySpace also finally grows up.

It was time for MySpace to get more organized, end the chaos and admit that they could do some things that Facebook showed users wanted. Otherwise, Facebook was going to keep snatching everyone up and not giving their data back.

In admitting defeat, MySpace has another chance to get back on top of the popular social networking buzz, but they will have to do more than just catch up to Facebook to come out on top.

Comments

Last month, Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net asked his Twitter followers — that includes me – why they loved Twitter. He took those responses and turned them into a video slideshow on YouTube enhanced with a rocking instrumental track.

Check me out around 4:03 AND AGAIN at 4:17. Yeah, that’s right — twice. Don’t worry. I’ll sign autographs at the end of this post. I just couldn’t capture my thoughts in 140 characters.

While most people highlighted Twitter’s ability to create a virtual water cooler or bring a bit of social to the desktop of those who work solo at home, my response was simply this:

I love twitter b/c it keeps me up to date on the latest happenings and makes it easy to share interesting finds.

Before going a little deeper to say…

Most people I talk to are outside of the contacts I have in real life, so I get exposed to things I may not have seen otherwise.

To expand on what I twittered — see, I told you I couldn’t keep it to 140 characters — Twitter has thus far been my forum for geeking out and releasing my blogosphere-hugging link monkey. It satisfies my fear of missing something by allowing me to listen in and respond to the conversations of hundreds of individuals that I admire/watch/read but never meet for coffee.

The real value in Twitter for me is being able to listen in on the thoughts of like-minded Internet junkies. It’s like being a talking fly on the wall in a Web 2.0 startup or a major blog. I find things on Twitter that I wouldn’t catch anywhere else, and I follow others who have interesting things to say even if I can’t keep their blog in my RSS reader due to the overload.

Twitter is also my release for early-adopter-itis. Despite what the walking-two-miles-in-the-snow, non-Internet types might believe, friends from my own generation have not completely jumped aboard the twit-train or the Internet. While Facebook has gone mainstream, I am, for the most part, alone among my off-line friends in my Twitter usage and social network-aholism. I often explain Internet memes to friends and co-workers, but in Twitter, I get to join a cloud of people that know what’s up online. Is Twitter the Cheers bar of the Internet future?

I haven’t gotten the return value of a Scoble just yet due to the “friend divide” that Scoble defined. My growing army of followers don’t yield the huge number of responses that a ProBlogger can amount, but regardless, I have found value in Twitter because the people I follow keep me in the loop and make me, as Scoble said, “smarter, richer, cooler, and funnier” — and better looking.

Comments

I know that this post by Steve Rubel was posted last year, but in mining my RSS feeds from Google Reader today, I came across this post on the movement towards Moneyball Marketing as marketers look to online and had to talk about it because of how much I enjoyed Moneyball.

In Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, Lewis showed how baseball manager Billy Beane built a successful team by changing the critical stats. Rather than choosing players based on the big time stats that the Yankees liked, the A’s started getting players with good on-base percentages and slugging percentages–players that weren’t as highly sought after in the drafts and had less star mentality.

As Rubel projects, the same could be true for marketing in the online realm. Marketers looking to reduce costs could go more niche and find smaller sites that produced better results. These sites wouldn’t have as much of a “star mentality” and don’t charge as much for advertising.

I had never thought about Moneyball applying to marketing until I read this post, but now it seems like a great way to describe the more efficient way of marketing on the Web. Rubel also lists some ways to start applying the Moneyball method:

Here are three ways you can apply Moneyball Marketer in your organization today:

1) Become a Super Cruncher – Look beyond the common methods for evaluating media and identify more meaningful, perhaps esoteric statistics. For example, make a buy based on a site’s ability to drive consumers to complete high value tasks.

2) Skip Reach, Go Niche – As hard as it is, try forgoing some of the larger sites in favor of emerging niche ones that deliver a higher percentage of your target. Work with them to create measurable, outside-the-box programs. For example, consider Takkle – an emerging social network focusing on high school sports.

3) Think Relationships, Not Impressions – The most successful companies in business today recognize that relationships rule. Consider launching programs that allow you to hone your relationships with narrow segments of your audience. Go beyond impressions.

Comments