MySpace China

» see myspace.cn as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i skipped myspace the first time, in its own language. in the years it was loud in america i was on msn in ankara, and the social site everyone around me eventually drifted to was hi5, not this one. so the chinese myspace was a thing i skipped without even getting the chance to, a copy of a site i had already passed on, aimed at a country i have never lived in.

this is reconstructed from the record, mostly in english. MySpace China, 聚友网 in chinese, went live in april 2007, set up as a chinese-owned company with money from News Corp's MySpace and a couple of local investors, and run by a former Microsoft China executive. on paper it was built to be local. News Corp had spent a year trying to get into china the careful way, as a domestic firm rather than a foreign import, which was the smart read of how that market worked.

the trouble was that local ownership did not buy local freedom. reports at the time said the china team had almost no room to move off MySpace's worldwide template, the same cluttered profile pages that were already losing at home. meanwhile Renren was giving chinese students the clean campus network they wanted and QZone was already enormous inside Tencent's world. a foreign brand running a foreign design does not win that. the CEO stepped down about a year in, and the layoffs started not long after.

the end, when it came, was quiet to the point of being sly. on the 15th of october 2011 the site went offline and the company called it a technical fault, with no date for when it might return. it never did. inside a few months the staff were dissolved and the domain stayed dark. by then News Corp had already sold MySpace itself, back home, for thirty-five million dollars, a fraction of what it once was worth. the china branch was a small line in a much larger retreat.

~ the record ~

~ the transplant ~

i find this one more interesting from the outside than most people would. MySpace China is a clean case of a thing that looked localized and was not. the ownership was chinese and the servers were in china, but the product was still an american site in translation, and chinese users could tell. localization is not a language setting, it is building the thing the way the local web actually behaves, and that was the one freedom the china team never got.

~ the technical fault ~

the 'technical fault' line is the detail that stays with me. a company does not usually get to bury a website with a shrug, but that is more or less what happened here. the notice said there was a problem and gave no return date, and the site never lit back up. it was a soft way to close a loud brand, the corporate version of letting a phone ring out instead of picking up to say goodbye. anyone still logging in got the fault page until they gave up.

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