MySpace founder admits he "choked" his social media vision
Gutted MySpace founder Tom Anderson has admitted that he “choked”, allowing Facebook to realise his ambition for a social web following the slow demise of his own social networking site.
MySpace was founded by Anderson in 2005 and was once the web’s most popular social network, it has been steadily losing market share however and is now and has only recently been offloaded by News Corporation for a fraction of the price they paid.
Writing on his Google + profile, Anderson said: “My original vision for [MySpace] was that everything got better when it was social — so I tried to build all the super popular things used on the web (blogs, music, classifieds, events, photos) on top of MySpace’s social layer… But quickly I saw that it’s really hard to layer in social to features after the fact. At MySpace we had the luxury of having social first, and building the products on top of that layer. Then I choked and Facebook realized that vision.
Anderson made the comments whilst praising Google’s newly launched +1 network saying: “Google already has top-notch products in key categories-photos, videos, office productivity, blogs, Chrome, Android, maps and search. Can you start to see/imagine what Google+ does for Gmail? Picasa? YouTube? Not to mention search? The +1 system that Google now has control of (unlike Facebook Likes) can really influence and change the nature of their search.”
From a peak of 73.6m in October 2008 user numbers have since shrunk to 35m as users flock to Facebook.