AOL To Take a Swing at MySpace
In one of those why-didn’t-we-think-of-that moments, AOL is reportedly working on their own social networking site. Given the fact that AOL has already dumped amazing amounts of resources into its AIM Instant Messenger service, there’s a very good chance that the new, web-based social networking site will have a significant tie-in to the AIM service. As John Fine points out in his BusinessWeek article, your AIM buddy list was really the first social network on the internet anyway. AOL also has their own original content, online email, and a large user base in place, so those factors could determine the shape of the as yet unnamed service.
But will AOL be successful? They have millions of users, but are those users going to get behind (and use) a MySpace-style experience? The things that made MySpace take off were that it totally embraced user-generated content and that it made sharing that content easy (in the form of photos, music, and blogs). That part is simple enough. But there’s a secret ingredient to MySpace that’s difficult to replicate, and that’s the cool factor. You need teenagers, college students, bands, and other voyeuristic types to get stoked on your service if you want it to take off. AIM Chat aside, AOL has a rather lousy win record in that game. The giant already tried their hand at a more basic social networking site when they launched AOL Groups, only to see it fail. They also failed to cash in on the Blog market, losing out to services like LiveJournal and Google’s Blogger.com.
Not to mention the fact that the social networking playing field is already crowded. Friendster, MSN’s Spaces, Google’s Orkut, and other sites offering similar services are all singing backup to MySpace.com right now, and will continue to do so for ever and ever until the next big trend in social networking comes along. Some users are already a little burnt out from maintaining pages, all of which contain essentially the same data, at Friendster and Myspace and Orkut and LinkedIn. One group of friends uses one service, another group of friends uses a different one, so you end up having pages on two or three or more various sites, all with the same cute bio and funny/sexy photographs and lists of your favorite movie stars. Can we handle another?
The bottom line is that unless you can improve on the quality and speed of service that MySpace offers, not to mention their huge and ever-growing user base, you’re not going to be stealing too many eyeballs.
[Link via Techdirt]
