MySpace Is Mine

Thursday April 27th 2006, 10:37 pm Printer Friendly Version
Filed under:AllPeers, World Wide Web, Social Networks, Online Identity
Posted By: Cedric

The following is an abstract from a talk I made a few days ago about AllPeers and its future evolution.

“I have been running large online communities for the past 10 years. In 2002, with my previous company, we were given the NewMediaAge award for Best Consumer Website in the UK just in front of the Guardian and the Observer. For that reason, sometimes people ask me “what is it with MySpace, why is it so successul?” The fact of the matter is that there is absolutely nothing special about MySpace and if you are old enough to remember the good old days of the late internet 90’s you will certainly remember Geocities which in 1999 had 35 million members before it was acquired by Yahoo for a share-only deal worth $4.5b. Geocities was a service to allow non-technical people to build a home on the web. Just like MySpace today.

MySpace, just like Geocities at the time, is about sharing. Sharing your identity, sharing your tastes, sharing your pictures, sharing your music, sharing your videos. It’s about existing online. The problem with MySpace is that it is built on a publishing platform called the Web. The Web was never intended for sharing but for publishing. As a result, the user experience is disastrous, the site at peak becomes slow and they have to keep on upgrading their infrastructure to keep up with the growth currently estimated at 250,000 new members a day.

AllPeers has been built from the ground up as a sharing platform. It’s like MySpace but on steroids. In 1999, the web servers used by Geocities were as powerful as today’s consumers’ personal computers. Almost 10 years later, we are using 0.0005% of that local power to browse the web and publish on MySpace. The idea behind AllPeers is to leverage the power of the user’s machine to allow them to maintain and control their online existence without the need to upload files to a remote server. Without the need to wait for pages to refresh. Without the risk to expose your private details to lurkers. With AllPeers, you decide who can see what and with the 20 pages long list of features we have, you will soon realise that it is about time that we rethink how we use the network and give the power back to the users.”


5 Comments »

  1. […] http://www.allpeers.com/blog/2006/04/27/myspace-is-mine/ […]

    Pingback by The other side of the firewall » MySpace Is Mine — 4/28/2006 @ 1:21 am

  2. “AllPeers has been built from the ground up as a sharing platform. It’s like MySpace but on steroids.”

    Man…i cant wait :) On a side note, i use Facebook.com rather then MySpace :P

    Comment by Elessar — 4/28/2006 @ 8:17 am

  3. I’ve been watching the project closely. Can’t wait to see how AllPeers turns out. Hopefully you’ll topple over the giant :)

    Comment by My Hot or Not — 8/22/2006 @ 6:08 am

  4. […] gegenüber stehe. Zehn Jahre sind im Web eine Ewigkeit, da hätten die Entwicklungsschritte von Geocities zu MySpace schon etwas größer ausfallen dürfen. Wenn ich also beim Web 2.0-Hype etwas […]

    Pingback by Der Unsinn des Anti-Web-2.0-Manifest — 7/20/2007 @ 9:18 pm

  5. I’ve been watching the project closely. Can’t wait to see how AllPeers turns out. Hopefully you’ll topple over the giant

    Comment by camper — 10/26/2008 @ 9:35 pm

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