News/rumors that large layoffs are about to befell MySpace didn’t come as a shock to me. Not sure if that’s the general perception amongst those who pay attention to social media? If a client approaches us with an undetermined plan to launch an online social media campaign our unofficial advice has been that we feel MySpace might not have the demographic you are hoping to target, or simply a suspected feeling that MySpace had peaked in 2007/8.

It seemed that in 2006 MySpace was on everyone’s lips and the punchline to most jokes on the late night circuit. Facebook was still a fringe media, Twitter was left to birds exclusively. Three years later and it does seem that the buzz has slowed (although still a huge traffic site) and the rot might be setting in. For me – it was a combination of three things that made venues such as Facebook far more fun, useful, interesting…..because they didn’t share the ‘issues’.

First, the lack of actual names meant your friend “Sarah” might actually be beachbucket87 and how could you possibly know? Second…spam…and lots of it….Monty Python sketch levels of spam. Lastly was the ‘pimp’ my site features that for the most part resulted in pages being either poorly structured/proportioned , overrun by terrible colors, very slow to load or if you really pimped things too much – all three!

Now I don’t want to see MySpace vanish, and it has been especially good for bands/musicians, but I hope that the recent admission that traffic has dropped 20% means that a complete overhaul is around the corner. Think of Facebook, will we be there in 4 years? My guess is by then 1 or 2 more giant social networks will have taken over the landscape and we’ll be chuckling at how “2009″ Facebook was. As a final note what are we calling this decade?? It’s nearly over and there seems to be no official term. I like the noughties but it seems t0o late to convince anyone…

Tim at greenseedwebdesign.com