MySpace 2.0 Includes Founder's Original Vision For Site
The Guardian, Tuesday, June 24, 2008 12:16 PM
MySpace founder Tom Anderson has discovered that even having 200 million friends and Rupert Murdoch as a boss won't help when your website is no longer flavor of the month.
Anderson admits it was a wake-up call when the huge organic growth of the site he co-founded with his friend Chris DeWolfe in August 2003 and sold to News Corp. two years later suddenly came under pressure. "We felt like we'd peaked," he said. "We weren't tailing off, but our growth was slowing down. Everyone who was going to get on MySpace got on it long ago. We've been rolling along and things have happened easily for us. We've never fought an uphill battle. We launched the site, people loved it and we kept growing and growing."
Over the last year, MySpace has been quietly shedding its chaotic look for something more polished. In the redesign, the homepage "becomes more like My Yahoo," Anderson said. "It's a start page into which you can pull in anything you want. The hope is that this creates a world of utility for people who are using MySpace, but also attracts a new group of people who realize you can pull in email, stock quotes, weather and so on." Anderson says the redesign will fulfill his original vision: "The very first plan I wrote for MySpace was that it would be a portal, but a portal wrapped around your user profile."
Read the whole story at The Guardian »
Anderson admits it was a wake-up call when the huge organic growth of the site he co-founded with his friend Chris DeWolfe in August 2003 and sold to News Corp. two years later suddenly came under pressure. "We felt like we'd peaked," he said. "We weren't tailing off, but our growth was slowing down. Everyone who was going to get on MySpace got on it long ago. We've been rolling along and things have happened easily for us. We've never fought an uphill battle. We launched the site, people loved it and we kept growing and growing."
Over the last year, MySpace has been quietly shedding its chaotic look for something more polished. In the redesign, the homepage "becomes more like My Yahoo," Anderson said. "It's a start page into which you can pull in anything you want. The hope is that this creates a world of utility for people who are using MySpace, but also attracts a new group of people who realize you can pull in email, stock quotes, weather and so on." Anderson says the redesign will fulfill his original vision: "The very first plan I wrote for MySpace was that it would be a portal, but a portal wrapped around your user profile."
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