Crossposted at my last.fm journal.
So apparently Last.fm was bought by CBS.
Marvelous. I have predictions.
- It will start off good with a cash infusion for some dream features the creators have been wanting to do for awhile
- CBS will start to get antsy and want a return on investment
- last.fm will try to bridge the gap between a vibrant Web 2.0 community and making money for its new corporate masters. The old users will stick around but will start feeling the changes and looking for alternatives.
- after a year or two of trying a best of both worlds approach, CBS will demand changes to make them more money. The old users will start leaving and the users left will be new and know nothing of the community standards.
- The users that are left (mayeb higher numbers but less buy in and attachment to the community) will turn the social aspect into a wasteland of stupid comments, bickering and flamewars. Last.fm will slowly wither on the vine as the site transitions from community driven and vibrant web 2.0 to yet another corporate attempt at vibrant web 2.0 that fails miserably
Ah well.
For those curious, Flickr is currently somewhere between steps 3 and 4 after their purchance by Yahoo.
Update: MySpace is most defintiely a 5+ on the above timeline.
2 Comments
Ugh! This sucks. Slowly but surely, every non-mainstream musical outlet is going to be targeted, either by corporate deep pockets or that asinine internet radio bill. And I was JUST talking about how last.fm had perfected the “recommended if you like” aspect of their programming.
:-/
Yeah. CJ and I were talking about how you can pretty much make a Web 2.0 scale from “Unknown And New” to “Rotting Corporate Whale Carcass”
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