On June 28 it emerged that serious bids for the ailing social network are now as low as $30-million. That's $550-million less than News Corp paid for them in 2005. Ouch. So what's to say Facebook, the current darling of social media, won't share the same fate in time?
After all, just five years ago MySpace was riding high with over 300-million registered users and valuations as high as $12-billion. Yes, that looks like kids' stuff compared to Facebook's 750-million strong active userbase and their $80-billion to $100-billion valuation range, but perhaps Facebook is rising higher only to fall faster and harder. Here are a a few reasons that it probably won't happen.
1. Mark Zuckerberg
He's never been the most likeable guy in Sillicon Valley, but the 27-year-old founder and CEO of Facebook is a true leader. Kara Swisher, an influential tech journalist, called him a "toddler CEO" in 2008, but has since admitted "the toddler is a prodigy".
Unlike at MySpace, there's never been any doubt about the vision for Facebook, or who was directing that vision. Yes, the Facebook team have made plenty of mistakes, but thanks to Zuckerberg's leadership and their strong founding principles, they have never faltered.
Zuckerberg's preternatural wisdom, as well as his knack for attracting and retaining amazingly talented people, has allowed him to see off threats as varied as aggressive acquisition attempts by web giants, privacy furores and massive user revolts over redesigns. And all the while he has retained nearly a quarter of Facebook's stock.
Unlike Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson -- MySpace's founders -- Zuckberg is a technologist first and a business guy second. This has proved vital to the second component of Facebook's huge success.
2. Technology
MySpace was built very quickly using a proprietary platform called Cold Fusion. While this gave them a head start on the market, it ultimately shackled them. Facebook, on the other hand, have always been an open-source house.
And where MySpace used technology, Facebook created technology. The depth of technical genius in the Facebook team is obvious when you look at the open source projects it has launched. Its creations, like Apache Cassandra and HipHop for PHP, are now used by thousands of other sites around the world.