AOL To Launch “Myspace Killer”
by Michael Arrington on April 19, 2006

AOL may be preparing to launch a Myspace-type social network sometime in the next few weeks, says Dave Winer.

This went from rumor to “confirmed likely” in posts and comments by Jason Calacanis and Jordan Running (also here) (both now at AOL). A comment in the last link suggests that the new service will be open to non AOL members.

This market is red hot. Mature players like Facebook and Fox-owned Myspace basically own their respective categories, and better-featured (and funded to the hilt) newcomers like Tagworld and Tagged gunning for the big guys. Even aging Friendster, mostly written off as living dead, has made a recent (if quiet) comeback based on Alexa stats. Fickle teenagers and young adults are quick to jump ship to the hot new thing, but these existing players will certainly not lie down for AOL.

We’ll have more on this as it develops.

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MySpace launched in 2003, btw.

 
 
 

you suck really bad since you blocked my space now we can not get on it

 

u should check all the myspaces and look in the profiles and there are some prettty nasty pictures

 

This is all crap. Every other year someone comes up with a new online gimmick and then a crowd of companies decide to jump on the bandwagon. Thank goodness for OsiXs. Hopefully the internet madness is about to end.

 

Were do i find some new MS layouts?

Thanks,
Steve

 

xpybkri zpjmdsg cjdilckltw

 

Myspace will always have way more killers then AOL can have.

 

Forever Geek has a great post on how MySpace is really hyping its 100 million user number to the press. It’s a great study. The study checked out 303 profiles and found that 50% of users don’t even show up in a month. That’s a very high attrition rate! I wonder what happened to those 50 million users?

Here’s what I think are possible explanations:

* MySpace users have 2 accounts. Like free email accounts (think Hotmail and Yahoo), many people own more than one account - one for personal email and one for spam. So, if indeed, the average MySpace user has 2 accounts, then it makes sense that 50% of them won’t show up after a month.

Read More

 

AOL would have to come up with something totally new to get the market to turn to them. They don’t exactly have the hip image that other sites have. Even yuku, which has the huge ezboard market behind them are adding new things to increase their appeal, but they are not starting from scratch in a niche market.

 
 
 

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