We all knew Twitter was on the way up and MySpace was on the way down, but who’d have thought that the once-mighty behemoth would be eclipsed by our favourite avian upstart quite so soon? Yet here it is, in black and white (well, blue and orange):
(Credit: TheNextWeb)
Without wishing to over-dramatise two lines on a graph touching each other, this is a watershed moment in social networking. But what’s interesting isn’t so much Twitter’s recorded site traffic, which is predictable, yet doesn’t mean much because so many people use third-party clients, but rather MySpace’s numbers. The graph’s seemingly inexorable decline suggests a steady exodus of users. How on earth can the site hope to recover in this market now? Its upcoming clutch of mobile clients? MySpace Music? It seems my previous optimism on the subject was profoundly misplaced. No wonder there have been so many redundancies recently.
These figures should be read in the context of a market (the UK) where MySpace has never been as dominant as in the US, and in which Twitter has been particularly successful. But still… somewhere, I can hear a bell tolling.