The title of this post will bring a smile to fans of the greatest rock band to have ever come out of Ireland (and, no, I certainly do not mean U2). I wish I could claim it as my own, but in fact I stole it from the Financial Times, where it appeared today as the headline of an editorial. The editorial itself wasn’t bad, either. It looked at the new Google-MySpace partnership through the lens of the eyeball-grabbing that characterized the dot-com bubble.
“As a business,” write the editors, “there are reasons for caution. The youth market is a fickle and ever-changing niche. Seventeen-year-olds need to tell the world that they love Coldplay and will never get married. Ten years on they know the depressing truth and have no time to share it on MySpace.” Ain’t it the truth. “The next generation of teenagers, meanwhile, may see MySpace as the boring site their big sister used, and share their angst via a new competitor.”
But the media business has never been much interested in separating the fads from the future, any more than it’s been interested in mulling over yesterday’s papers:
Big media likes eyeballs, however, and the money splashing around is reminiscent of earlier deals based on user content and networking. In 1999 Yahoo bought GeoCities, the homepage community, for $3.5bn in stock. In 1998 AOL bought instant messaging company Mirabilis for $287m. In both cases the huge user base and network effects were cited as reasons for the deal. But all the buyers got was a room full of servers, some intellectual property and a handful of creative staff. GeoCities was eclipsed by, among others, MySpace. AOL Messenger fell prey to competition from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
All of which shows the speed of change on the internet. Google, the coolest internet company of all, has had to spend $900m just to bolster its search business. News Corporation has done well, for now, but imitators will find search engine cash harder to come by. As all fashionable teenagers know: today’s essential is tomorrow’s embarrassment.
Take it away, Fergal:
A teenage dream so hard to beat
Everytime she walks down the street
Another girl in the neighborhood
Wish she was mine, she looks so good
As Rupert Murdoch might say,
“I wanna hold yer, wanna hold yer tight,
Get teenage clicks all through the night”
There’s a number of delicious ironies about associating that particular song with the over-energetic claims made about social networks.
“GeoCities was eclipsed by, among others, MySpace. AOL Messenger fell prey to competition from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.”
Eh? AIM is still the market leader, despite the fact that you can’t *not* run MSN/Windows Messenger on most Windows PCs. I don’t think GoogleTalk has even 1/5,000th of the users of AIM. And Mirabilis made ICQ, not AIM.
Not a big deal, but if they’re only going to cite two examples to make a point, they should two that actually bolster their position.
I’m pretty sure it’s A teenage dream, so hard to beat. Incidentally, the Undertones were from Derry (NI), but I think they’d have called themselves an Irish band. (And, while I’m picking nits, I’m also pretty sure that the ‘Ongoing’ post was written by a cogitator.)
Otherwise good.
Undertones may have been the best but Stiff Little Fingers were a close second. Actually saw SLF cover Teenage Kicks in a concert in DC decades ago. Steve LaBella covered Jimmy Jimmy quite a bit too. Positive Touch might have been their best album but it probably killed the band, although one may argue that from the ashes came That Petrol Emotion.