2 years of astonishing growth - YouTube and FaceBook crush MySpace

At the start of 2007, MySpace, Google and YouTube were close to level-pegging for worldwide web traffic. FaceBook was barely on the radar.

One year later, YouTube was running at twice the traffic, while FaceBook had caught up with the other two.

At the start of 2009, FaceBook has caught YouTube, while MySpace is close to declining. The success of YouTube started with a lot of fairly juvenile and fun content, but now it exceeds MySpace for great music content, and good film resources, and, well, the whole of life - almost.

YouTube probably has the market locked tight for genre and niche content - all readily available, easy to find, and with good stepping stones to similar items. FaceBook, on the other hand, has captured both the tweenies market - great networking and mesmerising apps - and the family networking crown.

Prediction for the next 12 months: Blogs will catch up with MySpace, especially if FaceBook ever work out how to get a Blogroll to work properly.
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Context is not new - YouTube and FaceBook the future

Content is not king. Context is king. Unless you have a mechanism to classify or categorise in some way, content becomes a difficult mess.

Search engines helped find content on the web, but still rather inefficiently. Even now, with all the improvements to Google etc, it is still possible to receive thousands of results from a search query.

Microsoft was wrong. Internet Explorer was wrong. They were old concepts and have been totally overtaken by REAL context kings:

YouTube
easily find videos that work (rather than false or broken links in Google or Yahoo)

MySpace
easily stay in touch with friends and common interests (in contrast to clumsy and boring email software)

Facebook
easily find friends and share common interests (in contrast to clumsy and boring special interest groups)

Firefox
providing a browser with tools that work

So ignore the nay-saying of the big boys and go with what works for users. Every computer manufacturer (except Apple) and every hosting software (except Joomla) can be shown to have very fundamental usability failures.

Learn from history!

The Egyptians were smart enough to know that context was king, and used a version of XML-like descriptions for their scrolls to help describe the content. (Yes, the Roman Christians decided to destroy all that and set us back a few thousand years.)