We’ve been arguing for some time that conventional research and reporting is a lot like buying a newspaper – they tell you things that you know already.

Sorry to any professional researchers out there.

Conventional wisdom used to be that you would wait for evidence from a tried and tested research group before expressing an opinion. Those days are gone, real life is moving too fast for that now – the recession was the final nail in the coffin!

My point is that when I read that;

“Facebook, Twitter’s growth leaves MySpace in dust”

My immediate thought was;

“Well ain’t that the flipping obvious – where have you been?”

Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote “It’s not a business problem that MySpace has, it’s a core user experience problem.”

Exactly!

The media world has consistently been tying to figure out how social media could make them money, advertising, services even pokes – without ever really looking deeper at what makes people use Myspace/Facebook/Twitter?

In April 2009, Newscorp even went so far as to hire an ex-Facebook employee in a desperate attempt to get some market share back.. see here

Meanwhile Facebook were doing the smartest move ever by making themselves look and feel alot more like the new kid on the block – Twitter.

So…over 6 months later when I’m being told that;

“According to Hitwise, MySpace can still boast 30 percent of the social-networking market but in terms of growth the site is in a freefall. Last year at this time, MySpace captured 66.8 percent of the market.”

I’m yawning…big time…and tweeting my friends to point out the rather late assessment by the good people at Hitwise.

The media, advertisers, their agencies and everyone in between need to realise one thing.
We, the consumers move on quicker than Kanye at an awards show.

In fact, this week Miley Cyrus is getting equal amounts of puke and praise for her announcement that she deleted her Twitter! Either it’s foolish, or it’s the smartest thing she could do.

Myspace’s crimes? They underestimated Facebook and it overtook them. Facebook never made the same mistake with Twitter.

The last roll of the dice was Myspace attempting to be a music portal..we never understood how they ever thought that could work long term (maybe a bit ahead of ourselves here – but if no one uses Myspace, why would they go there to get tracks? Is that not what they have Google for?)

I guess they had to try something, but that’s the rules of today’s markets – you snooze and you literally lose.

But what is next??

It’s really hard to say at the moment, because the contenders are plentiful and not really big enough. Tumblr is one of the biggest of the small up and comers. It’s kind like your own blog, and a lot closer in feel to Facebook than Twitter, but without being either, which is it’s biggest strenght.

A couple of the other runners up are Posterous and FriendFeed. The first being close to Tumblr without the elegance, the latter having more of a Facebook update feel.

But are any of these three really the future???

Maybe not because there is also this little thing called open web.
Now at BANDIT we’re not über technical, but open web could go something like this:

“Today online shopping means visiting Amazon.com, reading reviews from strangers and conducing a transaction.

Tomorrow, as everything becomes social, you will be able to shop Amazon directly from within your iGoogle page without ever having to visit the site. What’s more, Amazon will show you what your Gmail address book friends have publicly said about a product and/or its category in any one of thousands of online communities. Finally, to help you further Amazon will offer an aggregated view of your friends’ friends opinions in a way that protects their identity.”

So when Miley Cyrus deletes her Twitter to get more privacy, it may work on short term basic, but the way the web is moving, it won’t be long before reality catches up with her, and exposes the same things she’s now trying to hide.

But before open web becomes a reality, she still has to look out for Perez Hilton.

BANDIT