Sometimes it’s unbelievable how fast and disruptive things can be in the harsh world of online - http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/18/hell-freezes-over-as-myspace-fully-surrenders-to-facebook/

Today, Myspace announced that there are basically surrendering what used to be their core business – Social Networking and Social Graph. It’s true that have already announced that they will focus on Media, Music, etc. moving forward, but still, implementing Facebook Connect is just saying: “Okay, we give up on Social”.

I remember that not a long time ago, Myspace was bigger than Facebook. Two years ago, we used to talk advertisers about Social Media campaigns and Myspace was still all the rage. Advertisers knew they wanted to be on Facebook as well, but Myspace was the focus for many of them. Just a year later, in 2009, everybody was just raving about Facebook and didn’t even want to hear about Myspace anymore.

What went wrong? it’s hard to tell, but my personal take is that it’s all about the user experience. Facebook just did an awesome job with that (and are still doing a great job) while Myspace failed to further develop their product to have a great user experience. They didn’t experiment enough to learn and develop their product to be better.
Facebook today is very different from Facebook two years ago, Myspace is pretty much the same. Facebook adapted and learned how to make a better product. Myspace didn’t, and that is why, I think, they reached the spot they are in  today.

This story should be a classic Harvard case study, which I hope will be written in the future. the lesson is not a new one – if you can’t adopt your business to fit your customer needs, you won’t survive. Customers needed a site they loved and worked for them. Facebook did exactly that.