YNOT – Jonathan Miller is a chief digital officer at News Corp., and when he took the stage at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week, he had a simple message for why MySpace.com lost its position as the dominant social networking destination on the Internet.
“I think that what you see in the space more than anything else is if you don't keep innovating and moving forward you get in trouble," Miller said on Thursday. "You can't stop … and MySpace stopped.”
Miller said that when looking to the future of MySpace.com, the company would need to return to a focus on music and entertainment, two important components in the site’s early success. However he cautioned that it wouldn’t be productive to think about “fixing” MySpace.
"Fix implies something was broken and you just put it back together the way it was and [consider] it's fixed,” he said. “That's the wrong way to think about it. You have to think ahead."
“MySpace started with an essence around certain things, and one of them was music, and meeting new people," he added. “We're going back to basics in that sense, but you've got to make it relevant to today and going forward.”
Miller acknowledged that gaining ground on a well-entrenched social website like Facebook.com will be a daunting challenge for MySpace. Online users don’t easily change from familiar and comfortable surroundings to something unfamiliar without significant incentive.
"Everybody in the company is upset that we didn't keep going when we had the real momentum,” he admitted. “Regaining momentum is always much harder than keeping momentum going."
Connor Young covers Internet Technology and Legal news for YNOT.com
