The sovereign nation of MySpace

Myspace is becoming a virtual country of its own. With 75 million users, it has more users than all but 15 countries. That is an amazing number. MySpace could literally fill a country on its own. Consider the amount of time an average MySpace user puts into MySpace… And consider the mantra that “time is money”. The economic potential of the time MySpace users put into the site is measurable in tens of billions of dollars per year.

Techcrunch has called MySpace MySpace, The 27.4 Billion Pound Gorilla. In many ways MySpace is the 24.7 Billion Pound gorilla. However would you displace them? Competing head-to-head does not really work since a very important aspect of a social network is the users themselves. MySpace will win hands down in that category. There is speculation that MySpace will crash and burn because it will become ‘uncool’. Critics constantly cite Frienster as having become uncool. However, there are alot of reasons why that happened, alot of those being because Friendster did not respond well to its users. Though the forthcoming failure of MySpace is overhyped, it is certainly possible. However, it will not happen on its own (because MySpace is no longer cool). It will be due to a competitor coming up with a better paradigm for social networking or due to MySpace changing how it acts towards its users.