Wikepedia founder Jimmy Wales predicts that MySpace will fail since it doesn’t properly draw users into a community as perfectly as Wikipedia does. Wales said MySpace, “hurts my eyes.” From an interface perspective MySpace has a number of problems. The interface looks like it was just slapped together without any planning or usability analysis. Another problem is that it is extremely slow and unreliable. The system is written in ColdFusion which is not an adequate platform for the enormous amounts of traffic MySpace handles. In my opinion, MySpace’s real tragedy is its failure to take the web to a new level. They have captured such a huge active and interconnected web community but fail to really take advantage of it. They should streamline the interface and build up some innovative social and collaboration tools. Facebook is much further ahead than MySpace in this area, but MySpace has a goldmine of a user base.
Wales continued by saying, “There’s way too much advertising and they’re not really respecting their own community. We’re not similar at all – you get involved in a community.” Wikipedia has truly developed an virtual community in ways MySpace hasn’t. Wikipedia not only derives its content from the user community but it is actually controlled by the community. Time will tell which model will eventually succeed.
