Tag Archives: myspace

Myspace Lost All Content Uploaded Before 2016



Who knew that Myspace was still a thing? Not me. I deleted my account there a long time ago and never looked back. It turns out that there are people who still use Myspace, and who are probably very upset today. Myspace has somehow lost all content that was uploaded to its site before 2016.

According to The Guardian, MySpace is blaming the mass deletion on a faulty server migration (which happened more than a year ago). MySpace has confirmed that music that had been uploaded to the site has been lost permanently.

More than 50m tracks from 14 million artists have been lost, including songs that led to the rise of the “Myspace Generation” cohort of artists, such as Lily Allen, Arctic Monkeys and Yeasayer. As well as music, the site has also accidentally deleted pictures and videos stored on its servers.

Cory Doctorow, on boingboing, pointed out something we can all learn from this mass deletion of content. He wrote: “Someday, this will happen to Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, etc. Don’t trust the platforms to archive your data.” He recommends the Internet Archive as a good place to archive things.

It appears that the things you uploaded to Myspace are gone forever. This could happen with whatever other social media sites you are using. It might be a good time to make sure you have copies of the photos, videos, music, writing and artwork you posted on social media. Do it before it all mysteriously disappears.


MySpace, What have you Done?



MySpace logoWhen MySpace had its most recent makeover (that one that included the addition of Justin Timberlake’s involvement), it created a problem for itself. New users were able to create MySpace accounts in the new system. However, for quite some time, MySpace couldn’t figure out how to get the previously existing user accounts (that were now on the “old” MySpace) to integrate.

Today, people who had a MySpace account that was stuck in “limbo” got an unpleasant surprise. The Ask MySpace blog that talks about the change starts with a big understatement:

“You’ve probably noticed some changes to your MySpace account”.

Oh, yes, people certainly did! The “old” MySpace is gone. The “new” MySpace is now at the URL for the “old” one. People who had an old account can log into the “new” MySpace with their old login. Unfortunately, doing so will not actually give them access to what they were expecting. Plenty of things are just plain missing from the “old” accounts. What things?

Those that were posting work into the “old” MySpace blog on their accounts woke up today to find that it has disappeared. This, all by itself, was enough to make a lot of people rant all over (other forms of) social media. People want their blogs back, and they aren’t going to get them. As a writer, I can imagine how it would feel to lose all the blogs that you took the time to write, edit, and post over the years. (That’s why I blog on my own website and not primarily through any form of social media).

People caught in this shift from “old” MySpace to “new” MySpace also had their private messages, videos, comments, posts, and customized background designs deleted. MySpace even removed the game activities that these users had posted and/or interacted with.

The sudden removal of all these things from users accounts is not making people happy. Instead of encouraging these users to move over to the “new” MySpace, I believe MySpace has instead given people a good reason to stop using MySpace altogether.


MySpace Loses Even More Ground, Gets Dropped From Windows Live



Just when you thought things couldn’t get much worse for MySpace, the once-king of social networks, it’s now official that Microsoft is giving them the boot from their Windows Live services.  MySpace was once one of the prominent social services that Live users could connect to, thereby importing and exporting status updates via Windows Live Messenger and importing MySpace contacts into both Messenger and Hotmail.

However, it seems Microsoft has recently sent an email to all Live users who had connected MySpace accounts to notify them that these import/export services will be ceasing within the next few weeks.  They even point out in their message that this will have no effect on other social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn – it’s strictly MySpace that is getting the boot.

Both Messenger and Hotmail are two of Microsoft’s most popular properties, but it’s unlikely this email went to very many of their users, and those who did receive it will likely be hearing the death knell for MySpace.  That’s the sound that most of the world heard a while back.  A copy of the email, which was posted earlier by Neowin, can be seen below.


GNC #684 Google+ Review



I dig in deep and give you a inside look at Google+ along with a whole bunch of tech news on top. I also talk about some new initiatives I am working on that I am pretty excited to see where it leads. I am scouting for talent in Hawaii specifically details on the show.

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New Infographic – The Demographics of Social Media



The website Advertising Age released a cool new infographic comparing various social media – namely Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter.  There are some interesting facts revealed here.  For instance the Social Media space is lead by the 35-54 age group, the leading country for Facebook is the US, but the second is Indonesia, the leading country for LinkedIn is also the US, but it’s followed by India, and females outpace males as Twitter users.

While some of this strikes me as common sense (like Twitter being dominated by the 35-54 age group), some of it amazes me (like there are significantly more female users and visitors to Twitter).  For anyone who runs a web site this is pretty good information to have.  It can provide a lot of aim to your marketing and SEO efforts.  For those who don’t run a site it’s still a bit of pretty interesting information to parse over.

demographics of social media


The Problem with Early Adoption



Today I got an email from a web site called Threadbox, stating they were closing down and I had seven days to export my information. Threadbox was set up as a collaboration tool starting in Nov of 2008 was released as a beta in the spring of 2009 and went fully public in April of 2010. As of Aug 3, it will be shutting down after being purchase by MySpace. How or if Myspace will use the service is unclear. Many times when a smaller company is brought by a larger company, the smaller company’s service disappears. Often it is just the core of the service that is used by the larger company. This scenario is great for the team that created the service, but is often devastating for the end user. The end users are forced to find new services that do close to what the original service did. This is often hard, since even if the new service does the same thing, it does it differently. Most people are resistant to change and tend to react negatively to anything they are not use to.

This scenario is not new and has been repeated hundreds of times with services like Friendfeed, (brought by Facebook) YouTube (brought by Google) and others. Some like YouTube, seem to go on as if nothing happened others like Friendfeed limp along, being kept alive by a core group of user. Others simply disappear never to be seen again. The problem for end users is it is difficult to commit to a new service, when back in your mind you are wondering how long it is going to be around. This just adds another barrier for adoption of new services. It is hard enough to get most people to try a new service and often with social services they are only useful if your friends also join. This is the problem I am having with a new service I discovered called Cliqset, which is an applications that combines all of your friends conversations, no matter whether they were posted on Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz or eighty other services into one river. I like the service, the problem is not enough people have joined and you only see the post from people who are on Cliqset. The only exception to this is if someone @ you, then that will show up on Cliqset, whether they are on Cliqset or not. My quandary is do I remain with a service that I like in hopes that more people join it, or do I abandon it. This of course is the problem that most early adopters have, they often join services far ahead of the rest of the population. It is often a question of whether the service will survive long enough to become mainstream


What Makes A Tech Success?



It seems in the world of computers and the Internet there is always a steady stream of new things on the horizon, as well as a steady stream of new products and services. It’s been this way for many years at this point.

There are always winners and losers. Winners can win big, and losers at worst fail to make any marketplace splash or even a ripple and end up in the tech dustbin of obscurity with few people ever knowing that the product or service ever existed.

What is it that makes for a successful product? Why is it that some products and services that seem very similar to other products and services end up becoming household names, while others end up being cancelled domain name landing pages?

It’s obvious there are a variety of factors that come into play. If it were easy to predict these things, we would have a lot fewer losers. Why did Twitter become a household name, whereas similar services such as Plurk and Jaiku languish in the shadows? What enabled Facebook to steal most of the MySpace thunder?

New products and services that end up being successful frequently incorporate elements and principles of previously-existing successes, but package them in more compact and useful forms.

Initially when Twitter came along a couple of years ago, I heard people talking about it, but I was a bit resistant to sign up. I felt like I had plenty of ways to communicate with people, so why did I need to add yet another account to a service that would steal away time I already had filled, only to ultimately let yet another account go dormant? I finally signed up for Twitter, and after I began using it I began to understand the value of it. With a service like Twitter, the more people that are using it, the more valuable it becomes.

About the same time I signed up for a Twitter account, I also signed up for a Plurk account. After a few visits to the Plurk website over a period of a month or two, I haven’t been back to the site since.

I believe what is valuable about Twitter is that 140 character limit per Tweet, forcing people to be succinct with their wording. Twitter and Tweet are cute names. The site design is simple, the blue bird logo pleasing to the eye, and the developers kept the API and name open to other developers, allowing an entire ecosystem of ancillary products and services to develop around it at the same time it was rapidly increasing in popularity. Twitter is very much like chat, which was already well established, but it had the added value that it either could be in real time, or not, able to be accessed from a vast array of devices beyond the Twitter website. Twitter also allows you to subscribe to just the people you want, and ignore or even completely block the rest. Twitter also allows you to reach out and touch people, and it allows you to monitor what others are up to whose lives are at once very similar to your own, yet often radically different. You can spend as much or as little time as you wish interacting with the service. Another thing that turned out to be incredibly useful with twitter is the vast 24/7 real-time data stream that it generates. Real-time Twitter data mining has proved to be quite valuable to many people.

To be honest I have always thought that many MySpace pages were often monstrous, unbelievably cluttered messes that often took a long time to load. Nonetheless, MySpace became popular because it obviously served a need with a younger demographic.

I’ve always thought Facebook’s interface is somewhat confusing, though allowing for far less cluttered and confusing-looking profile pages. I still don’t quite understand what got Facebook to the level of critical popularity – perhaps the less-cluttered, faster-loading profile pages gave it the critical edge over MySpace.

It should also be noted that Facebook allowed for an open API, allowing a myriad of interesting and often useful applications to be plugged in to its interface.

However it did it, Facebook managed to get to a critical mass of users where it became THE thing to sign up for and THE place to be to stay connected with family, friends and business associates. Something interesting has happened with Facebook that has never happened before – everyday, non-geek people who had never built website profiles in all the years they had been doing email and web browsing were suddenly signing up for Facebook in unbelievable numbers. Mothers, dads, aunts, uncles, grandmothers, etc. were suddenly showing up on the same service with their kids, nieces, nephews and grandkids. Once the ball rolled, Facebook became an incredible success.

I started noticing a while back that many people were starting to use Twitter and Facebook to communicate with each other in lieu of email. At this point I find myself getting pulled into that trend myself. These services don’t offer the relative privacy of direct email, but they allow for easy, frequent public conversations and easy sharing of personal media such as photos between friends and family on a global scale.

What I take away from the success stories versus the less-successful competitors is that oftentimes the differences in design and implementation can be slight, but those slight differences can offer real, tangible advantages to the end user. If those often-slight advantages can somehow help get the product or service to a critical mass threshold, they can find themselves catapulted to the point of planetary awareness.