Dated and largely unininteresting

It's important to note before listening to this that it was written in 2009, when MySpace was still quite popular and hadn't been decimated into irrelevance by Facebook yet. However, even with that context in mind, this is still largely uninteresting and doesn't have much to take away from it.

Despite what the title says, there's very little actual drama in this. The ownership of MySpace changed several times and was not always everyone's preference when it did but there were never really any large battles over it. Most of the book just serves as more of a time piece on the corporate history of MySpace. It barely talks about the technological innovations and challenges of the site at all and was written for and I suspect by, someone who doesn't really understand technology. Given its time of publishing, it doesn't go into the site's rapid downfall, sale by News Corp. for a song or later history of trying to find its identity and constantly failing at it.

The presentation is fine. The reader does a passable job, though makes several errors throughout that should have been caught in editing.

At the end of the day, the story of MySpace is largely one of a bunch of tech bros in scummy industries who really had no idea what they were doing but happened to be in the right place at the right time and ended up getting undeservedly rich from it. That's it. MySpace failed because it was a fluke and the people in charge of it knew nothing about their field or how to complete in it, even as superior offerings sprung up around them, which they largely ignored until it was too late.

If you want to hear a story about the rise of social media and the drama around it, listen to the hugely superior Facebook: The Inside Story. Give this a pass. Even as a product of it's time, it's still not well done.

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