Goodbye Tom. We Hardly Knew Ye
News coming out of the Silicon Valley this morning suggests that Tom, everyone’s first friend on MySpace, has left the company. His last status update was on Christmas Day and he hasn’t logged-in since late January. In his place is the appropriately cold and corporate “MySpace Today” connection for all new accounts.
Relatively speaking, very few people actually know Tom (although my friend Jeff Horne does, and I know Jeff, therefore vicariously, I know Tom, which makes me awesome), but he represents something MySpace can never have back. Relationships. Real live, living, breathing people online looking to connect with each other. And Tom was at the top of the list.
Today, MySpace is where hookers go to troll for customers, musicians go to fish for fans and comedians go to die. It is owned by Rupert Murdoch, an angry old man that hates the internet but can’t seem to live without it. It has been beaten mercilessly by facebook, which is owned by a cute little college kid that got together with his smart college buddies and built a clean, simple place for friends to connect.
Rupert and Tom, BFFs
I believe that MySpace lost its soul the day it sold to News Corp. The trouble is that these sites require enormous amounts of money to build and maintain, and advertising alone, especially in the early days, isn’t nearly enough to stay ahead of the bills. So these companies go out and find investors, and facebook is no different. In fact, facebook has raised nearly $750 million in funding so far! But they didn’t do it by selling the whole shootin’ match to a large corporation with no clue why or how the site became so popular in the first place. An investor gives you money, and usually, guidance. An owner calls the shots. And there is a massive difference between the two.
I could write for days about MySpace being too loud, too busy, too clunky, too slutty, too spammy, too 2006. But since it goes without saying, I will just end by saying that, with Tom’s departure, MySpace is saying goodbye to an era. An era in which the platform was about meeting and keeping in touch with real people. About sharing tastes and opinions. About blogging and photo-sharing and commenting. Now it’s just a big ugly wasteland with no direction, fading into the mist of former pop culture trends.
Goodnight, sweet Tom. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
Related Posts: MySpace Music Shutting Down, New MySpace Slogan: Discover and Be Discovered
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You hit the nail on the head with this:
“…but he represents something MySpace can never have back. Relationships. Real live, living, breathing people online looking to connect with each other. And Tom was at the top of the list.”
If social networking and social media is all about the relationships (even the relationships to the sale), then losing your best salesperson is commercial suicide.
I don’t know the last time I logged into MySpace but it does indeed look like a cultural wasteland. Shame – it could have been so much more. That’s Murdoch for you.
I echo Danny Brown’s comment. You’re absolutely spot on about the connections. I used to have a profile on MySpace, but left because I got tired of all the solicitations from pornographers. Now, I only visit the network if I’m wanting to listen to free music; there’s no connecting going on at all.
There is a God,my prayers have been answered.
Good bye MySpace and good riddance!
I knew him.
Tom who?
I always wondered if Tom was a real dude . Myspace was a good stepping stone for social networking. I do still like Myspace for music promotion, but i’m noticing some better places on the web like reverbnation for music promotion. There can only be improvements. It’s great time to be a musician with all these promotional tools.
myspace is still very important to musicians and artists in general
And ta-freakin-da, Owen Van Natta steps down too
http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=142046
What was that….like 6 months???
Nine, but who’s counting? And I certainly don’t believe it’s a coincidence. Had I not been sunning in Cabo at the time of this blog post, I would have tied Tom’s departure in with Van Natta’s, the unceremonious removal of the official tagline, “a place for friends,” and an in-class interview we had with an artist boasting over 20,000 friends on MySpace that has recently seen a landslide of movement away from MySpace and toward his facebook account… but the semester is young and I had a tan to catch. Stay tuned.
MySpace is dead. Long live MySpace!