I’m beginning to feel sorry for MySpace.  I once had a profile on it.  So did most of my friends.  It was customized with shitty HTML that took forever to load.  I had my top friends and it felt good when I made it into other people’s top friends list.  I read people’s comments and checked out their personalized songs.  Not anymore.  Those days are over, and I’m not the only one who feels that way.

Yesterday’s WSJ cited Jonathan Miller, News Corp.’s chief digital officer, claiming, “Facebook, in some ways, is about what people are up to.  Myspace is about what people are into.”

Here’s a graph of MySpace’s traffic since April according to Quantcast.  It surely doesn’t look like people are “into” it.  In fact, I think the opposite is quite true.

News Corp. isn’t run by idiots (except for the people who think Fox News is a legitimate news station).  They’re well aware that MySpace is a sinking ship, but I don’t think they understand why.  It’s UI is awful - it always has been.  But most importantly, it has lost its flair for individualism.  People used to express themselves, now desperate artists and businesses spam the walls of strangers promoting their mixtapes and photo-sharing sites.

MySpace thinks the solution is to redefine itself as an entertainment portal with a focus on music and movies.  Their recent partnership with Google for Music Search is a good start, but is it the right direction?  AOL is a giant entertainment portal, and they’ve established that the model is no longer robust - it’s deteriorating.

I like MySpace, but if they’re going to stay afloat they’ll need to rekindle what attracted users to them in the first place.  It’s a futile task to go from a social network to an entertainment portal and expect user retention.  They were once modeled around individuality and now they’re embracing a polar opposite - mass content consumption.  I don’t see that boding well.