As anyone who follows developments in social media, even on the periphery, know, MySpace is losing the platform battle to Facebook. Late last year, Facebook overtook MySpace as the largest social media site in the world and while Facebook has continued to grow, MySpace has more or less stood still.
To compete effectively, MySpace had to so something radical or accept their new position as number two to Facebook…and given the growing popularity of Twitter, maybe even number three. One of the reasons Facebook has been able to attract so many new members has been their focus on adding new languages to their traditional english-based profile. Members can choose from a fairly comprehensive list of languages in which to navigate their social interactions with other members. This is a powerful tool as one of the reasons for the highly fragmented nature of social media has been the inability of some popular sites to localize their offering.
It makes sense of MySpace to also quickly add this functionality in their offering which they did recently. However, there is where the similarity with Facebook ends. Facebook, in their localization efforts, kept the philosophy of letting their members choose how they want to see their site. If they were existing members, they would initially see their site in english and were offered the option of changing it to whatever language was suitable for them in the Account Settings. If they were new members, they could opt for a change in language with the little icon at the bottom left of the sign up screen which would convert the screen to the language desired. This is a logical and fairly seamless way of giving your members options.
MySpace on the other hand, perhaps being now part of a large corporate entity, decided that they knew better than anyone else, especially their members, what language their members should be using. So in their latest effort, they automatically converted pages from certain countries to what they THINK is the native language without bothering to ask if thats what their members wanted. So on a given day, a member would try to sign into their account and find that everything has been converted into a language some of them don’t even speak.
I’m not sure what is worse. The assumption that they at MySpace know better than their members what they want, or that what they know is so obviously wrong. I will give you the example of my country of residence, Singapore. Singapore is a country in South East Asia and although the population demographics is about 70% Chinese, there is a significant Malay and Indian population as well. With this diversity, the medium of communication has always been English and not Chinese (simplified or othewise). Its not unheard of for Chinese Singaporeans not to be able to read Chinese. MySpace on the other hand, thinking that since Singapore is in Asia and that everyone in Asia speaks Chinese, set traditional Chinese as the default language option. In doing so, they made two mistakes. One, that all Singaporeans speak and read Chinese. The second is that traditional Chinese is used in Singapore. In truth, traditional Chinese is used in only two territories: Hong Kong and Taiwan. Mainland China uses simplified Chinese as do most other countries.
With the sign-in page showing everything in a Chinese dialect, its been difficult for users to convert their pages back to English because they can’t even find out where to make the change. In social media, if the platform is hard to use, no one will use it. Such has been the case with a number of my friends who have stopped using MySpace wholesale and decided to build a new profile on Facebook. The barriers to “churn” are extremely low.
If MySpace think that this latest initiative will help them take on QZone in China, then I think they are sadly mistaken. They also misunderstand the cultural differences between social media users in China and in the US. This latest foolishness just helped to alienate some existing, loyal members. They don’t stand a chance against Facebook.
Tong Hsien-Hui
Some Meowsings...... 
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