They’re the forgotten company of social networking - less fashionable than Facebook, less techie than Twitter, less useful than YouTube. But maybe MySpace is the only one of them that’s making money. That at least was the message I took away from a meeting at Stockholm’s European Technology Round Table with Travis Katz, who runs all the network’s activities outside the United States.
He’s quite a contrast with Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook who I met last week - and that tells you something about the difference between the cultures of the two businesses. Mr Zuckerberg seems like any young developer you might meet in college or at a Silicon Valley start-up. He’s shy, focussed on coding rather than commerce, and passionate about making his product better - though he finds that passion hard to communicate.
Travis Katz is older, more at ease with a crowd - I met him as he got off the stage after a pretty fluent half-hour chat in front of the banking and technology audience of ETRE. He studied politics at college and was amused by the spat that we’d just seen on stage between market fundamentalist Tim Draper and democrat donor Rob Glaser, without ever revealing his own politics. He is just as passionate about MySpace as Zuckerberg is about Facebook - but far more comfortable about talking about the business as well as the user experience.
MySpace has of course been in the warm embrace of the Murdoch empire since 2005, and Mr Katz indicated that this wasn’t a place