The glory days are over
By Chadwick Matlin of The Big Money
There has been a death in social networking’s social network. Last week, News Corp. (NWSA), MySpace’s owner, pushed out site co-founder Chris DeWolfe. The other co-founder, Tom Anderson, stepped down from the executive office, ceding all control over the product. (He remains an employee of News Corp.) Six years after they started the networking site, they’re gone; their profile pages serving as their most visible legacy. It’s a seminal moment for the social networking industry. High-profile heads have finally started to roll.
DeWolfe’s and Anderson’s ouster is a clear indication that social networking is no longer a naive child. The MySpace coup tells us less about MySpace—we’ve known for a long time that they were losing ground to Facebook—and more about the state of social network sites as a whole. After much development (and venture capital), the industry has clearly entered a new era. It’s been proven that social networks are popular, important, and transformative. But that doesn’t make them profitable businesses. Just ask DeWolfe and Anderson.
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