I had some bad news for Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, the founders of MySpace who now run the business for Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. They'd lost my son's high school.
DeWolfe and Anderson, who sold to News Corp. last year for $580 million, didn't ask why. Instead, they cited statistics that showed that their numbers were strong and opined that the exodus might have been a geographical anomaly; East Coasters seem to skew toward Facebook. Anyway, Anderson said, even if some teens did jump to Facebook for their main online socializing, they would still keep coming to MySpace because of its flexibility in design and all the media it offers.
It was an interesting window into where their hearts are.
"We're working on 10, 15 different things," said Anderson. But none of the ones we discussed seemed to address the problems that led my son and others to go to someone else's space for social networking, be it Facebook or Bebo or somewhere else.
The conversation turned to upcoming MySpace features like weather reports and a video service to counter YouTube. The defection of my son's school didn't come up again. I guess they'd forgotten about it.
If your site is not being mass-adopted in waves, it is probably not sticky. If your site has never been mass-abandoned in a wave, then it probably never was.
