#1 When I take a photo with my phone and beam it to Flickr it needs to push it to my Myspace Library, my Facebook library and every other of my social media places (It already pushes it to my blog and tweets it via FriendFeed.) And this needs to work in reverse also. If I post a picture to Myspace it needs to push it out to Facebook, tweet it, to my Flickr library, my blog, everywhere I have a Social media presence.
#2 If I write a blog post, it needs to automatically post it to my Myspace Blog. If I write a Blog Post inside of Myspace it needs to push it to my regular blog, tweet it and send it to the Facebook stream.
#3 When someone messages me, sends a friend request, makes a comment it needs to notify all my other places, including an SMS to my cell phone. Of course this has to be granular so you don’t get SMS’s all the time, but that’s a no brainer. Likewise I need to be able to return messages, comments, make friend requests, approve them etc. from my phone and every other place on the web or network. Let’s say I meet someone at a party and they have a myspace page too. I should be able to add them right there on the spot from my phone. Lets say I’m a musician playing a club. Everyone in the audience should be able to add me from their phones and I can auto add them back right there from my guitar. If I’m broadcasting that show on Kyte or Qik people should be able to tune into my Myspace page to see it. For that matter all these video services need to talk to each other. If I make a video of that show on Qik or Kyte it needs to automatically progagate to Youtube, Myspace, My blog, tweet it out and notify my Myspace friends.
All these services must communicate and work together to survive, even eventually Facebook. The Social Web demands it. Web 2.0 vendors are not competing with the other vendors in their “space.” They are competing with themselves to enhance their particular strengths and shed themselves of their weaknesses. Starve the living daylights out of your weaknesses. Feed your opportunities. Peter Drucker says, “Don’t solve problems, seek opportunity.” The opportunity for social web companies is to earn people’s trust by being completely open in every possible way to the other companies that do certain things better. These companies will return the favor by opening up to the particular strengths Myspace and others can offer its users.
You are not competing for users. You are competing with yourself for trust from society. They are not “users” they are your partners.
Myspace has a particular advantage over Facebook in powncing on this opportunity and opening up completely and immediately. Their users don’t have the privacy expectations that Facebook’s users have. As a matter of fact their users don’t have any expectations of Myspace because, in actuality, they have no users. There are a bunch of accounts, but no one’s using them. But they could turn that on a dime by making these changes and become very relevant and vivacious again.
The goal is not to conquer the World. The goal is to interact with the World in a useful way, to be a part of the World’s community, offering the World your particular creative strengths, point of view, and services. In that way you add spice to the World’s personality and more importantly value, so that every facet of society benefits from the Communications Revolution, growing and contributing to a higher standard of living for all. From such noble efforts Golden Ages are born.
Right now our Society, which is now the World, is in a Wasteland mentality. “The center cannot hold” as Yeats said. This was exactly the situation the World was in, in the 11th century, the Dark Ages. It’s time for a new Renaissance. The only catalysts for this are the Microelectronics Revolution which began in the late 60’s and the Communications Revolution which began in the 90’s. They are the unstoppable bullet. Inertia is the impenetrable wall. What will happen when they meet? The battle is not over a platform. The platform is the infinite bandwidth of the fiber optic network. Each hair’s width glass fiber is capable of carrying an infinite number of colors of light, each color of light an infinite amount of information at light speed.
There is no battle anymore. In its place there is an opportunity to be a trusted steward, a trusted guide for the social graph to the unlimited Cornucopia that the Universe has always had and that technology is opening the door to, at en ever increasing rate. “Listen to the Technology,” the great Carver Mead says. “What is it telling you?”
Open.
(thanks to @techcrunch for digging and for writing a better headline as professional journalists, successful ones like them, can probably do in their sleep. My original headline was("Myspace's Solution is So Simple")
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