Which of the major social media contenders will succeed and which will fall by the wayside like an unfurled and greasy burger king whopper sandwich wrapper? The question is real, and in the past social media networks and related tech companies have come and gone like a transient hobo riding in on the western train. The real question is; does anyone even care anymore?
When Myspace went belly up (ok, I know that technically Myspace still exists and therefore hasn't actually turned on its back and died) there was something to be felt. I distinctly remember my introduction to Myspace, I saw some other people using it and, to wildly oversimplify (or perhaps not), I thought it was really, really stupid. I refused to sign up, until, like many others, a friend made an account for me and handed over the password. This was many years ago now, I'm not positive on the exact time frame but the oldest message in my inbox was from 2003. So, suffice it to say, I had been on there for quite some time.
All this means that it was very strange for me to watch Myspace collapse into an unfunny joke from a fat old bar man. I won't say that I lost sleep over it, and surely I shed no tears. I did, however, feel some sort of connection. I remember all those things people joke about now vividly. I remember seeing Tom's smiling face glaring at me with news and updates. Did he know that he would one day be the punch line of a social media joke? I remember being young and creepily staring for far too long at Tila Tequila's extremely, um, charismatic (?) photographs. Did she know she would one day be dodging bottles on-stage during an Insane Clown Posse festival?
Of course it would be impossible to answer any of these questions, my pseudo celebrity never got much past "oh you're that idiot aren't you?" So until Ms. Tequila decides to start returning my phone calls, I will have to remain content with pure speculation. I have, through a strange and meandering education on the most obscure edges of reality, learned to speculate quite well. What has all this consideration (picture a bewildered ginger male in his mid-late twenties scratching his head and raising his eyebrows inquisitively) expounded (yes, expounded)?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that they more than likely had no idea that the end was nigh. From what I can recall Tom did well for himself, selling off Myspace to Rupert Murdoch for an astronomical price. Ms. Tequila as well, while she may have ventured more or less into obscurity, I find it hard to believe her war of attrition waged on the innocent adolescent drooling boys like myself was waged in vain, somewhere along the lines it's only logical that there would be some level of cash-flow. Still though, it can't be easy to watch your empire crumble, for reasons that are not as forthright as you would suppose. Sure, you could blame mismanagement and an unwillingness to play catch-up with many newer innovations. Yes, you could blame the intense over-advertising and glitchy programming, but really, at the end of the day, did anyone (not in the tech universe) see this coming?
I sure didn't. The point is (a dull point, maybe a blunt object's attempt at a point. Consider a bludgeoning tool maybe, instead of a point) that full collapse can occur to anyone. Myspace may have made me feel some small amount of sympathy, but would the collapse of Facebook make me feel the same? I doubt it, and with Google + being the much spoken about new buzzword in town, it is conceivable that Facebook could lay in the gutter with a knife in it's big brawny back as well.
Only time will tell what will become of all of these social media entities, but remember, there was a time when Live journal was the big killer social media craze, same with MySpace and many others. There will always be new tech, but can the new leave room for the old?