The Core

I would love to hear what really caused this thing to collapse, although if you look at their traffic (attached) it seems rather steady.  I always hear little snippets but never really understood what dismantled it.  Obviously once the exodus to FB started to happen, it created a massive feedback loop.

Was it all the fake profiles? That it was more of a place to meet new people, rather than stay connected w old friends? I simply left because everyone went to Facebook.  Personally, I always loved the full canvas and the personalization, better than FBs steril environment full of screwy UI/navigation.

I'd say the terrible design of myspace pages had an influence. Animated gifs, auto-play music and vids, 1+ mb page sizes, etc.

Though at the price I'll gladly be considered a bottom feeder.

myspace felt like the sites I designed back in the mid-90's on geocities. (remember geocities )

but all these teenie kids never got to experience the wonder that was geocities so myspace was born.

poor poor Justin
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/29/justin-timberlake-joins-myspace_n_887304.html

135 million emails with permission to market to them and all the data about them.......for $35 million...thats a bargain

I'd say the terrible design of myspace pages had an influence. Animated gifs, auto-play music and vids, 1+ mb page sizes, etc.

Though at the price I'll gladly be considered a bottom feeder.

Agree here - the ability for users to completely customise their pages was a killer. Friends just didn;t get "page load times" and pushed on "images and videos for all!".

Still, there's got to be some publishing revenue in the site even with normal content - a proper content publishing strategy with news and features I should imagine should work well in leveraging the domain weight.