There is always an element of the confessional about interviewing people, but I really felt like a priest when I interviewed MySpace co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe earlier this week. DeWolfe was keynoting San Francisco’s FailCon conference and our conversation naturally focused on failure – and particularly, of course, the meteoric failure of MySpace.
Not that DeWolfe considers MySpace to be a failure. Arguing that the company pioneered the social media revolution, DeWolfe – who is now the founder and CEO of the online gaming network Mindjolt – clearly has learned much from his turbulent experience as MySpace CEO. And yet one can’t help suspecting that if DeWolfe had one wish, it would be to go back to June 2006, back to that now almost unimaginable moment when MySpace was the social network and it had just overtaken Google as the most visited website in the world.
This the second in a weeklong series of interviews about failure. Yesterday, Vinod Khosla confessed to me that he had experienced many more failures than successes in his seemingly illustrious career.
MySpace is one of the world’s largest social networks, with about 125 million users. Originally inspired by Friendster, MySpace quickly grew to become the world’s largest social network, before being overtaken by Facebook. User pages are highly customizable and support integration with widgets such as Slide or YouTube. MySpace provides users with a way to connect around content and culture. MySpace was started as a side project of the internet marketing company eUniverse (now called Intermix Media) in August...
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