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Communities are red hot right now. Anyone who is anyone is either working, planning or talking about community building and how it can help their business. Between companies like Cisco, Reuters and Microsoft there are a number of large players with deep pockets looking to carve a piece of what many believe to be a very large and ever growing community pie. One of the things I have found interesting with some of the most recent announcements is the words that these companies are using to describe their latest forays. Reuters describes their community as a “Financial MySpace” while Microsoft described their recent launch of Microsoft Dynamics Live as the same thing.
There has been numerous articles written about all the communities out there and many pundits have given their opinions on why MySpace is sitting at the top of the heap right now. Though most seem to miss what I believe to the biggest factor on MySpace’s success; control. MySpace is still one of the only communities out there today that from the outside gave total control to the user. What I mean by this is MySpace gave their users the opportunity to literally change anything and everything in their profile, blog, etc. via HTML, Javascript and CSS. To this day, communities like Friendster, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. have never offered users that kind of control and ability to express themselves.
This is what I believe to be the defining point of the success of MySpace. I know it sounds incredibly simplistic and I agree there are a number of other factors involved, but without this capability, I do not believe that MySpace is the size and powerhouse it is today.
What do you think?
Stay tuned, a future post will be discussing why MySpace will in the near future lose it’s top billing.
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