MySpace Talks Nerdy - The Super Sexy Secret behind today’s Data Portability Launch
May 8th, 2008
Today, MySpace did something different.
Something bold.
Something sexy.
And like the one hot girl at the tech party, nobody knew how to handle it
Today’s MySpace announcement was totally misunderstood and mishandled by the press coverage. It was too hot to handle.
The fact that MySpace was taking a lead position among social nets and was launching its data portability initiative was covered ad nauseum amongst the big-boy blogs. Mashable scooped it, Techcrunch regurgitated it and Silicon Alley Insider buried it. Sadly, the New York Times did nothing more than parrot the objectivity of the prevailing coverage.
Even the reliably astute yet genealogically challenged Ben Worthen of the WSJ Business Technology Blog missed the story, deciding that pizza was sexier than MySpace.
Despite coming on the heels of MySpace parent company News Corp’s admission that social network profits are harder to come by than previously expected, the financial impact and forward thinking of today’s announcement seemed to go unnoticed.
That’s because whenever a hot, witty and available femme fatale appears in the online space, the blogosphere, early adopter and tech journalistic community seem to back up against the wall and watch helplessly as their bravado shrinks up into their stomach, leaving them without an original line, only able to muster an endless loop of fanboy quotes from genre classics.
Here’s the opening of the release. Read this quickly because it’s just a bunch of ambiguous spin. The sexy part comes in the analysis afterwards:
MySpace, the world’s most popular social network, alongside Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter, today announced the launch of the MySpace ‘Data Availability’ initiative, a ground-breaking offering to empower the global MySpace community to share their public profile data to websites of their choice throughout the Internet. Today’s announcement throws open the doors to traditionally closed networks by putting users in the driver’s seat of their data and Web identity.
What does this really mean?
With their data portability initiative, MySpace takes the first real step in developing a database for the broad publisher and consumer network ultimately designed for the contextual, hyper-targeted ad platform toolset (that’s a mouthful) under development by Adam Bain and the Audience Network team (if you need some context, read my post on the break up of FIM).
Here’s why that’s sexy.
There’s real value to knowing who a consumer is. What their likes and dislikes are, what their friends like and how the surf the web, what products they browse, buy, recommend and share.
That value can be monetized. Advertisers will pay increased CPMs for increased ROI, which they’ll get when their ad is served to a higher value consumer i.e. one who is seeing an ad based on a high degree of context.
In other words, data portability means that behavior can be tracked across environments and sold upstream to support web economics. That’s a sexy formula for increased dollars from advertisers flowing to the web community and content creators.
Here’s how the formula works:
What you say about yourself and what your friends said about you on MySpace plus what you read on Yahoo plus what you buy on eBay plus what you tag on Flickr plus what you write on Twitter equals a much more distinct picture of who you are as a consumer. Brands will pay a premium for that and MySpace knows it.
So…MySpace, you wanna makeout?
Now, if Facebook would just let down its hair and join the party. Talk about a three-way. Nerd Alert!
Tags: adam bain, Audience Network, ben worthen, CPMs, data availability, data portability, eBay, femme fatale, FIM, Flickr, myspace, New York Times, news corp, Sillicon Alley Insider, techcrunch, twitter, Yahoo
Posted by: jake Posted in BusinessYou can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 9th, 2008 at 10:04 am
In your analysis you don’t mention much about the value to the consumer of being part of the data portability – is it that I can type in some new stuff on myspace and it will update all my selected twitters, facebooks etc for me?
I think the current downfall for myspace is the fact that they are so terrible about controlling spam and seemingly very unprofessional in so many ways that few users will trust them with any more personal data than they’ve already submitted. Yahoo has been talking about the same thing for hella long - but are slow to really implement. But what they do have is the trust of their users. - at least moreso than myspace/facebook
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