Mobile Jones buys into the “traffic is all important” meme

I think traffic to a certain point is important. You want people to come and read the ideas/thoughts/discussions. But, at the same time, you have to stick what you wanted to. Dont distance yourself from your initial cause, just to gain traffic.

I post Xbox360 news, information, and some random things. The news/information about the 360 is stuff I want people to read.

I highly doubt MySpace sustainability. They've won over the teen crowd and some of the college crowd. Great, that's fantastic. But if there is anything the 20th century proved, it is that that target audience is fickle as hell. For a service like myspace to survive indefinitely, it needs to be something all demographics can find use in.

Also, MySpace is more ripe for disruption than pretty much any other company out there (including Microsoft). As Robert's son can easily see, it's not a good service. It's just a widely adopted service.

I don't know if I agree with that. To disrupt it you've gotta do some things that most big companies aren't willing to do. Like have a cool brand, an ugly, but usable, design, and be good at bootstrapping a community. Not many among us are good at that.

I was playing around with MySpace this past week and I don't understand how people put up with the site. Many of the sites that I went to are designed horribly. They jump out at your eyeballs making the user recall a bad acid trip, they take forever to load because of the music or video files, or both. It's clunky and hard to navigate.

In short, I think that there is plenty of room out there for a smart company to come along and disrupt them.

MySpace is getting bad news.

http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/001...

There are a few more factoids that both explain the MySpace phenom and are relevant to it's continued potential.

1. There are some "...people who love what they do."
This MySpacer, and
this one
obliviously fit Robert's description.

2. One of my former colleagues has long experience in the music industry and explains, "...these days the *first* question a band hears when they approach a label is: 'What's your MySpace URL?'" It's expected that all music acts will have a MySpace presence.

MySpace continues to build on the raw community service they started with by adding more sophisticated tools like feeds, podcast support and mobile service. Media is a different animal from technology and the ringtone market is a perfect example of that fact. Also many appealing to the teen demo, it continues to be multi-billion dollar market. Personalization and who is in the community are the draws. I could say more, but it would give away the presentation for tomorrow's Bar Camp LA.

There are lots of things that I see on Myspace that I do not like. Bad design, bad pictures, and lots of personal stuff that I do not think below there. My 23 year old daughter as a space and lots it.

then again, I will turn 50 in May, and remember my modem cost 1600.00 and I was thrilled that it would do both 110 and 320 Baud. And a 385 motherboard 5 years later was only 1600.00 too.

looking at stuff through a kids eye makes you think again. Your 12 year old and his blog are cool. People seem to not like him with a Mac over there. Kind of reminds me of you at things dealing with "we hate micrososft" people.

One other point, Robert. Your title is misleading as my article focuses on the size of the community with only a single mention of MySpace having 2 1/2 times the traffic of Google.

Just to be clear.

Robert: I don't think a big company will disrupt MySpace. I don't think any big companies are interested in it either. Social networking sites are more often bought by big companies.

What somebody needs to do is forget the "social networking" part of the equation. It's the "social enhancement" part that needs to be focused on. What does having 20,000 myspace friends get you? More myspace friends and traffic. For the bands on there, that's great, but what about the other 50,000,000 accounts? MySpace and its ilk give them a place to shout and that is certainly a start. There is definitely much more to this whole social networking space. Robert, you like to emphasize that internet search is still new and has a long way to go. I would say using websites as social and life enhancment tools has even farther to go.

And that's basically my justification for disruption. I use the term conservatively too. I won't get more into my ideas about enhancement though as I may have a site focusing on those very things launching later this year.

Richard: here's a hint. MySpace is owned by a big company.

I agree on your other point that we're just at the beginning. Can't wait to see what's next. Which is why I am doing stuff on Second Life.

First you have to get the headline right, Scoble. Alot of what is happening over there at MySpace is not about the traffic but about the audience -- they have a very captive audience that thinks that the blogesphere is a waste of time, because where they are at, the audience is much larger. Second, it's about companies listening to that audience. Microsoft would do well if they actually looked at MySpace and figured out what the kids were doing, because that's Microsoft's next set of customers. MySpace is responding to the needs of it's audience, and keeping them captive, and not treating them as "well, they have lousy pages and poor quality, I don't want to listen to them."

Frankly, Robert, it's your kind of thinking that's killing microsoft -- intellectual dishonesty, missing the trends that are happening today.

King: Microsoft is 67,000 people. Why do you assume my words transfer to the entity as a whole?

And, I really don't like people who aren't careful readers. If you read me carefully you'd see that I said my design is ugly too. I never said it was poor quality. Ugly != poor quality. The two are different things. I've seen very ugly things that are very high quality.

You also miss that I'm very much in awe of what MySpace has done business-wise. Having a huge audience leads to a whole lot of goodness there. But, you're missing my point and talking past me. Sounds like you aren't interested in having a conversation, but I knew that because you didn't use your real name here. Have a nice day!

Robert: Yes, MySpace is owned by a MASSIVE company now. But it didn't start quite that way. It's story of success is actually quite odd (I think) and different from most web 2.0 startups. I don't have the article that I read handy, but the creators of MySpace were part of a web bubble company that had split up. The company was a file sharing company, so they were already familiar with having lots of servers and handling large amounts of traffic and signups.

My favorite part of their story though is that the customization everybody loves there was an accident. If you go see how the customization is actually done (creating a CSS sheet on a separate site and pasting it into a field on myspace), you see that the only reason you can customize myspace is that the programmers forgot to parse out any code they didn't want in there. Tom admitted as much on TechTV I believe. How many other companies can say they hit huge success partly based on an accident?

"But, you’re missing my point and talking past me. Sounds like you aren’t interested in having a conversation..."

And you talked past Mobile Jones, the inspiration for this post. That's conversational how...?

Honestly, I'm not in the "Robert Scoble Watchdog" business, but you're pitching underhand. Just swinging at what comes in slow and centered over the plate.

"King: Microsoft is 67,000 people. Why do you assume my words transfer to the entity as a whole?"

Robert, isn't that your readers think? You are paid to be an evangelist for Microsoft, right? A kind of ombudsman. Dammit, your site title says "Microsoft Geek Blogger."

I also think MySpace is surffering from the "not invented here" syndrome because it didn't come out of Silly Valley or Seattle or Boston. But time has shown that most "tech" companies don't get media, and MySpace is a media company.

MySpace/NewsCorp is making some major moves, setting aside $2 billion for acquisitions. Could it be to position MySpace as an even more valuable asset? I think they learned from Friendster. They need to keep adding new and cool features or users will move on. Like the partnership with Helio/Earthlink mobile service. And the super secret acquisition they announced at the TechCrunch thing last week. Could this be something that adds value to MySpace?