RE: Everything will eventually go the way of MySpace unless you maintain it properly!
Yeah, I customized my own MySpace. It might of been one of my first experiences with JavaScript. I sorta remember customizing this effect where things followed the mouse. I also had music on my page. That was of course before everyone freaked out about copyright.
The video sort of going into how MySpace had trouble due to originally designing their site with ColdFusion. Because of that they had trouble scaling and implementing new features that they needed, like privacy controls and spam filters, and things to protect the kids on there. They probably would have had to completely redo the site with custom code to be able to iron out the problems.
I do think that the concept of MySpace and general idea of the site was way better than Facebook. Having a custom space on the internet where you choose how your page looks without too much hassle is pretty cool. You don't have quite the control of building your own site...but you don't have the cost or difficulty either, and there are already tons of people there. When they started to lose users though...things didn't change from where it was for years after.
Years later, after they were sold several times, they finally did a complete overhaul...but they still didn't get the people back.
I should go redesign my MySpace...which I actually never deleted, and still exists, and I still get spam occasionally for.
But the current MySpace is not the MySpace from then. I don't know if it's cooler now, but back then it had issues that people weren't really happy with and it started to lose all it's users over a few months. I think it actually started before it was ever even sold the first time.
If I was rich though, and I could get MySpace for cheap enough, I would totally buy it, and very carefully update it to be better, while trying to not ruin it, as so often people that don't understand technology do to these sites and apps.
Great. In some ways, Steem is a decentralized version of MySpace in that each platform can design their own layout for Steem. For example, Steemit has their layout. But then Busy has a different layout for Steem.
I'm making like analogy. I know it is a bit different. I was working with a friend in 2011 on Mea Omnia, like I said, which was going to be a website like MySpace, Steemit, Facebook. Mea Omnia is Latin for My Everything. The project died. We were not making money. We gave up. But I am glad that projects like Minds, Gab, Steem, Bit Torrent, Ubuntu, and others, are rising. I like Substratum.
Sadly, I don't think you can do a lot of customization on MySpace as of 2019, right now. Maybe I'm wrong but last time I checked, there are not a lot options. They give you a few choices. Most of the people on MySpace now are musicians and especially sex bots.
I was in college in 2006 and my friends/classmates were on Facebook. So, I joined it for fun just so that I could befriend all my friends that I had in real life on Facebook as a game because I wanted to see if I could have more than 200 friends or so. My friends had around 200 friends. That was about how many students there were in that small college, ABC, in West Virginia. My MySpace had around 800 friends which was a big number at that time. My Facebook went on to get 5,000 friends and over 20,000 followers. Maybe more than that as I think Facebook has been stealing followers from me every once in a while. Plus, I've had a few of my Facebook accounts banned. But I digress.
It is too bad that people had issues with MySpace. I think people just want a simple product that is easy to use. MySpace was good for me as I could tweak with it. You too. But most people don't like to do what Tim Allen and Jay Leno like to do with tweaking up cars. To me, MySpace was like my Hot Rod.
Maybe we need a site called My Safe Space.com
Maybe a site called MeMeMe.com
I wish there was a SteemSpace or MySteem where people got more control over their Steem page. You can't even choose your home page's color really. There's at least a dark mode now though. Steemit's source code is available on Github under the name Condenser, and Busy's source is too. Someone could fork Condenser and give people a LOT more control over what they can do with their site.
That's probably true for many...but it doesn't explain why so many left. They also could have made it a lot simpler to customize, with a WYSIWYG editor, or something like that. But they didn't change much of anything. I and others kept going back to our MySpaces for a long time occasionally...and it was still all the same. If they had tried harder to improve things, I think they wouldn't have lost so many.
Yes. Steem Space would be great with WYSIWYG. You know Facebook has been the same the past 15 years, basically. That is not really what matters. People felt like nobody was on MySpace and that everybody was on Facebook. That was the perception.
Why did people leave Yahoo for Google? Facebook probably was government funded, like Google. MySpace was not. Facebook was pushed out on people unlike MySpace. They promoted Facebook much harder than MySpace. They went after the college students first to get them on Facebook. And Facebook had a cleaner look. Facebook was made school friendly as MySpace looked less kid friendly. MySpace appeared as just a place for music. Facebook started becoming the place for friends, for school, for business, even tho MySpace is that too. Facebook is a copy of MySpace and yet people were given fake news about MySpace and Facebook that led them away from MySpace.
The biggest thing that happened was that people were too busy on Facebook to get back on MySpace. Facebook became an addiction for people and they ran out of time to hop on MySpace. So, people began forgetting about MySpace as well. For the most part, people simply ran out of time and stuck with Facebook, generally speaking. Most people didn't think about it. I didn't really think about it either until later on. I think a lot more than most people and most people were just hooked on Facebook from earlier on and it spread. Early on, only college students could join Facebook. It was a best kept secret. You had to have a school email address or else. Then they opened it to everybody. So, that made more people want it as they couldn't at first.