Hello from Alistair, another new Juice Digital recruit. My first two weeks at Juice have been a real eye opener, as myself and the team have discussed the vast potential of Social Media and it’s increasing dominance over our time spent online.
Two of the newest online media sensations: user generated feed Twitter and music streaming service Spotify have been two of my most used programs of 2009. Rewind two or three years and the undoubted kings of youth culture-centred Social Media stood MySpace: which boasted an attractive, music-loving, taste making community. It birthed the ‘online hipster’, who built up hundreds, possibly thousands of ‘friends’ and traded tales of nights out and their favourite new band MySpace URL.
But with Facebook upping its game and increasing its breadth of user applications and with recorded music virtually being given away by retailers, MySpace has suffered a PR and user mini-crisis, culminating in last week’s announcement of 30% staff cuts across the Rupert Murdoch owned, News Corporation company.
On Friday, the Guardian’s PDA blog laid out a seven-step plan to ’save MySpace’ which lobbied for the scrapping of Log-ins, an in-site media player for ‘purchased’ and streaming music and movies, a drive towards building local news communities and a PR drive to win back the attention of celebrity and key taste maker users.
Personally, I find the MySpace interface too clunky and it’s profile editor too complicated for the casual user. Facebook is more instant (MySpace quickly added Instant Messaging last year following the introduction of ‘Facebook chat’) and offers a greater sense of community involvement through its numerous user applications and city, work and education networks.
When was the last time you logged into MySpace? Is Facebook as good as some commentators suggest? Can you go a few hours without Tweeting? Let us know your social media habits.
