MySpace rolled out a new feature recently called “Status updates.” It lets me tell my friends what I’m doing. This is an outright feature copy from Facebook, but that’s not the biggest shame.
Learning from others and making something better is a practice that built the web. At Kinkos, if I continually make a copy of a copy, the quality will decrease. Online we have the opportunity to avoid degradation.
MySpace should have seen Facebook’s status problems, avoided them, then found a way to be unique.
I applaud them for poking fun at themselves with the default “extended network” message. It provides a clue about what they expect the user to enter into the box. Otherwise, their status entry is incredibly confusing. It doesn’t tell the users whether they should write their name or whether the “is” will be included. Everything has to come from the original example.
That’s not simple, that’s simplistic.
The mood is a neat addition, ripped from LiveJournal. But again, they haven’t taken it anywhere. All they’ve done is created a long list of adjectives. Some have emoticons, others don’t, but I don’t know until I make my mood public.
Like most things MySpace, this is only halfway there. They’ve simply created a copy of a copy, which leads to a watered-down feature unless you come to it with something new.
The reasons MySpace is losing users to Facebook is not because people want to share their status. Facebook is succeeding because they’re a place for originality, not another useless junk heap.
