Are Facebook, MySpace And Open Social Networks Dead?

I am on Myspace almost everyday and it is how I keep in touch not only with my long time friends but also with my new and dear ones as well. I believe most people use Myspace for the same reason. As far as I am concerned it well get past this bad press and live on and getting continue getting better.

Closed social networks have been gaining momentum for some time now. I first noticed them cropping up before social apps like MySpace and Facebook; back when internet forums were getting hit with waves of spam and some went underground.

Do I belong to one? Not to one of the one's covered in the article, but yes, I do belong to a private social network. I started it. Why keep it closed? To keep out the spammers and trolls of course.

And fwiw, same topic just broader in scope: http://blog.rebang.com/?p=1370

In an attempt to get a bigger audience and ultimately greater ad dollars, Facebook opened their network to people outside of college. The problem is you water down your offering. You can be incredibly exclusive and offer advertisers incredibly targeted young, educated people, who feel part of something special or you can create an audience of "people who eat food," and potentially open yourself up to competition you might not have had before, etc. This may work brilliantly but I'd rather be the only one who does what I do, and take the profits off that. They could always have created a second network for those that "graduate" out of Facebook and suddenly have another exclusive, niche property.

Maybe that's just small-time thinking by me but I'm sticking with the theory that "mass" media is not something you can just translate to the online world as a replacement for television. It's about focus.

As for belonging to any of them - no, I'm not that important. But my parents are family friends with the parents of the modelshotel.com founder. That's as close to greatness as I'll get in that world. :)

@Jon

Similar thinking to what I wrote in the link posted:

"If Facebook had retained its niche market and let that feed into a larger niche network aggregator of their making (Lifebook?), then they’d have the option of allowing not just plug-ins for the one application, but marketing-specific plug-ins for a network of modular applications serving targeted communities."

This is just in schools around here..

-Everybody have facebook
-Many people have myspace but never really use it.
-and what's the other one? people never heard of it.

I think myspace died here because facebook is just way easier to use.. like the search thing on myspace is a joke. All these Match.com "is ok to look" ads. didn't help either.