A recent post we talked about Jimmy Wales prediction that MySpace (NWS-A)would fail within a few years, although he didn't give any definition of failure, it seems it's because of it offering too much advertising in his opinion.
From another way of looking at it, the business2 blog talks about other reasons the site is struggling; one of them contradicting Wales' thoughts.
The first problem is with their MySpace News service which is extremely difficult to find within the site itself. Strange that they seem to be holding back from promoting it. It looks like they're going to have to come up with ways for the site to work together seamlessly like Yahoo (YHOO) and Google (GOOG) do.
The second problem is, as the business2 post says, "It could be that Murdoch is just being overly cautious, not wanting to ruin MySpace by fiddling with it too much. For Murdoch, who famously calls his newspaper editors to discuss headlines, that would be an extreme change in style - and a deadly business mistake. If MySpace can't extend its brand beyond online profile pages, other, more feature-filled websites will race past it."
I think that first part of the comments that Murdoch is "being overly cautious" are right on. From the time he bought MySpace Murdoch said not to interfere too much, but to find a way to monetize it.
Some of the things they're doing sound good, but they need to be a little more creative and innovative, while testing out things to see what will work.
This fear about trying out different things and being afraid to do things differently, or advertise, haven't been proven to be negative at all; it's only talked about as being such.
Even when Facebook made the one change that caused problems, they took the feedback and adapted to it and everyone for the most part was happy. MySpace needs to do similar things without being overly cautious. Very little has been proven yet in the social networking space.
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