Myeeos: Will it succeed?
Myeeos.com is a new social network created by gregj and and various business associates over at Myspacepros.com. Although it hasn’t been officially lanched to the public the site is functional, and it remains to be seen whether myeeos can achieve sufficient market share to be a success.
It is innevitabe that myeeos faces a long uphill battle ahead. In 2003-04 myeeos could easily become an overnight success like myspace and facebook, but times have changed. There are probably 1000’s of social networking sites- each one is vying for your attention, while in 2004 there were perhaps only a few such sites. Myspace and facebook dominte but there are many other smaller sites which are consuming marketshare; linkedin, bebo, taggworld, myyearbook and so on. The main issue is oversaturation, a barrier which I describe in more detail in my post Why web 2.0 kinda sucks.
But what if myeeos is able to capture just .01% of the social neworking marketshare? That would still be a lot of users. How hard could that be? But that is a huge if. The problem is attracting that .01% of usuers required A LOT of marketing. Millions of young people already use myspace and facebook, so the myeeos team will have to market a compelling reason for some of those users to switch over. As I have written in my post Are the most popular sites at risk for being displaced? I argue that trying to annex marketshare from a saturated pool of internet users is very difficult, if not unfeasible.
Unfortunately, from my preliminary review myeeos lacks a unique selling point that separates it from myspace. The layout, the profiles, the blogs, the friend system, the comment system all imitate of a stripped down version of Myspace. This doesn’t bode too well for myeeos future because why are Myspace users going to switch to myeeos when there is no advantage or special features that distinguish it from myspace? Myeeos can’t win a war against myspace on a feature by feature basis, but thats what it appears like myeeos is trying to do.
Overall, for myeeos prevent becoming an afterthought in the fiecely competitive world of web 2.0 it needs to find a unique selling point as soon as possible, and then accentuate that unique selling point in its marketing efforts. Trying to go toe to toe against the aready established social networking sites is futile.