This brought a few things to mind. Most obviously, it highlights the fact that MySpace is struggling right now and turning to traditional marketing tactics to try and win back users. Beyond that though, it’s a reminder of the differences between MySpace and rival Facebook, and how MySpace is looking to highlight those in an effort to remain relevant.
MySpace leads their marketing email promoting MySpace Music, which the company bills as “the largest supply of songs on the Internet.” Music remains perhaps MySpace’s most distinctive advantage over Facebook, and truth be told, is a fairly impressive service, though rumors that the latter will launch a service of its own or forge a tight partnership with someone like iLike persist.
Continuing on my 3-point email from MySpace, the social network promotes the option to upload your email address book to find friends. This has become standard fare on social networks, but perhaps wasn’t as key to MySpace in its early days, when the site was largely about accumulating as many friends as possible versus connecting with those you already know. Now that it has mimicked a number of Facebook’s features, like the news feed, it’s clearly trying to bring people who know each other closer together by plugging this feature.
That’s very much still in play in my Welcome Back email, as MySpace pitches their “People you may know” feature, which works much like that on Facebook, analyzing friends of friends and looking for connections.
The problem with this feature on MySpace is that because of the mass accumulation of friends that took place by many users, it’s harder for the social network to make quality recommendations. I only see one person I actually know in my suggested list, and it’s someone I’ve met once in my life. Mind you, Facebook's feature is starting to suffer from a similar problem as my network becomes far less personal.
So what’s the moral of the story (or email as the case may be)? Primarily, it seems, that MySpace doesn’t want to go down quietly, and will attempt to win back former users with its new features. But it also highlights the evolution of social networks over the past few years, and sheds some light on why Facebook ultimately won the most recent round of battle in the space.