MySpace Over?

Brad Berens from iMedia e-mailed me a link to this piece on PSFK by Jeff Squires that proclaims an end to MySpace.

MySpace’s hay-day might be over, because we’ve been noticing a surge of generic profiles circulating with no artistic, entertaining, or interactive elements whatsoever. It was almost assumed that the porn industry would get involved, but when the cheap pharmaceuticals, the refinance your mortgage, and the work-from-home schemes all entered MySpace, the fat lady started screaming.

When companies make profiles on MySpace, it’s only cool if they conform to the “local language.” They need to play by the same socially accepted rules as normal people. Friends don’t meticulously track down anyone and everyone within their network to show them some crap. Their needs to be an exchange between parties, so they both benefit from each other. When that rule is broken, it becomes spam, and no one likes spam (except Hawaii).

And that, my friends, is how "buy my crap" marketers destroy perfectly good online communities by bringing top-down marketing into bottom-up environments.

Yet another vote of support for the MySpace Has Jumped The Shark point of view.