MySpace's Simpler Privacy Controls Hint At Aggressive Anti-Facebook Agenda
In other words: hustle up, MySpace! Facebook has been cleaning your clock for social networking dominance for at least two years now, and you have a good opportunity -- where Facebook backlash is as significant as it's ever been -- to put a few user wins on the board. You've got every major privacy group in the country breaking out the pitchforks for Facebook, and a galaxy of Facebook privacy mistakes to exploit for new product and feature ideas.
MySpace announced the simpler controls Monday. In short, they give users the option of selecting a single privacy setting for the information in their profiles, and also determine the MySpace users, including the friends in their MySpace network, able to view that information. MySpace will also default to "friends only" mode if a MySpace user had previously used that setting on MySpace.
Mike Jones, MySpace's co-president, wrote in a Monday blog post that MySpace "early on recognized the issues facing a website with a massive global population and we've taken our responsibilities seriously."
MySpace on Monday said it would phase in the simpler privacy controls over the next few weeks.
"While we've had these plans in the works for some time, given the recent outcry over privacy concerns in the media, we felt it was important to unveil those plans to our users now," Jones wrote. "We believe users want a simpler way to control their privacy."
Once the dominant social networking platform, MySpace has struggled and continued to lose ground to Facebook. According to web traffic researcher Comscore, MySpace had 69.2 million unique U.S. users in April, whereas Facebook had 121.8 million unique users. The user growth tells the story: MySpace's numbers were down 2.5 percent from a year earlier, whereas Facebook's are 80 percent up.
MySpace in recent months has been trying to revive interest in its once-mighty platform, following continued user declines and the February resignation of its CEO, Owen Van Natta.
In March, MySpace offered a sneak peek of a new version of the MySpace platform, and Jason Hirschhorn, chief product officer and co-president, told media outlets "it would be silly to count us out."
But it's hard to be optimistic about MySpace when its improvements come in fits and starts, its numbers continue a steady slide into social networking irrelevance, and it lacks Facebook's cultural pop and constantly evolving features. Jones telling readers, "we remain focused on our mission of making MySpace the best environment for discovery, self-expression and sharing," as he does in the blog post, isn't going to bump up those numbers any faster.
Take a lesson, MySpace. It's time to get tough.