MySpace is dead . . . long live Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.

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MySpace was sold last week for $35 million. | AFP/Getty Images

Updated: October 25, 2011 12:29AM

I love it when the Industry collaborates to make my job easier. In the same 24-hour period, Google announced a new, hugely-ambitious social networking hub and NewsCorp announced that they had finally found some poor sucker willing to take MySpace off their hands at a fraction of their asking price and a fraction of a fraction of what they originally paid for it six years ago.

So step up to the platform, Google+. Feet on the “X”, please, and keep your arms at your sides so you don’t break them when (If!!! Sorry, slip of the tongue) the trapdoor releases.

I mean, I could end this column right here and get at least a C-. The MySpace sale lends the necessary skeletal Ghost Of Christmas Future vibe that permeates with all social networking ventures. MySpace was once the Google of its category. The company’s inability to respond to the popularity of up-and-comers Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr quickly turned it into AskJeeves.

The successes of those other three services point to MySpace’s failures. Facebook demonstrates that the centralmost feature of these services is simply the connections between users. For all of Facebook’s greedy, grasping, hydra-like reach into our personal lives, it’s exceptionally good at helping its users find those outer-ring people that quickly turns a list of ten friends and family members that you were able to name off the top of your head into a surprisingly rich personal community.

Twitter grasped this early on by incorporating a private direct-messaging system. Immediately, Twitter seemed like something more than a way to release a quick statement about the inability of one’s Wheat Chex to withstand the permeative properties of skim milk. It became a communications network.

But Twitter’s biggest feature and most important lesson is simple ubiquity. The service needs to be at the user’s fingertips every time and every place they want to use it. To this end, Twitter released simple, open APIs. In no time, it seemed, there were Twitter clients for every desktop and mobile OS and plugins for every browser and online service. Updates are dirt-simple. If I like this week’s “Abominable Charles Christopher” webcomic, I click one button underneath it on the strip’s website and presto, I’ve just Tweeted or Facebooked a link.

As the most populist microblogging service available with plenty of solid social networking features hardwired in, Tumblr is in a position to deliver features that other social networking services can’t. Tumblr values your network of friends and family, but it also values actual expression. You can Tweet “My son graduated from high school today...so proud!” and attach a photo. You can post something a little bit longer than that to Facebook, but after the first sentence or two, Facebook almost literally pulls the reader aside and says “Blah blah blah. Hey, did you know that a guy your cousin works with just found a lonely brown cow wandering FarmVille? She looks sad!”

The fact that Tumblr has tripled their number of hosted blogs (from about 7 million in January to more than 22 million as of this week) indicates either (a) that botfarms have figured out a way to automatically create and populate Tumblr blogs as part of a scheme to game Google’s pageranking systems, or (b) people are yearning to actually say things to their friends, and no other service or blogging platform is helping them to do that.

Tumblr’s success has been stealthy. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, I don’t think you’ll ever find yourself stuck in traffic contemplating a “Follow Us On Tumblr!” banner stuck to the back of a sewage truck. But they’ve quickly entrenched themselves as an important part of the social-networking landscape.

Connections, ubiquity, expression. I reckon that a social networking service can get by with any two of those three things today. MySpace barely scored one out of three. It allowed you to write at length, but the results were appealing only to folks nostalgic for the hand-coded HTML 1.2 webpages of the early Nineties.

So goodbye and good riddance to MySpace. Well, not “good riddance,” exactly, because the service was sold and its new owners (an online ad agency named “Specific Media” and Justin Timberlake) do intend to shock MySpace back into sinus rhythm, likely by refocusing it on its early successes as a platform for independent musicians. But its days as a player in conventional social networking are really most sincerely dead.

Don’t laugh at the company’s downfall, though. Do keep in mind that MySpace’s misfortune is also the misfortune of its users. Specific Media didn’t just purchase a social networking service. They also bought a community of users and an immense pile of data about their habits and connections. Yes, the initial terms of use agreement that you clicked through when you signed up for a new social networking service might have said that the service’s current owners wouldn’t abuse the personal information you give it. But it probably also said that all of that info was an asset of the company. If the company falters and sells the service, its new owners will have no such agreement with you. They might be simple scavengers, who bought the company’s assets for pennies on the dollar and will sell your personal information to God knows who for whatever they can get for it.

It’s definitely something to think about the next time a free photosharing service asks for your cellphone number “for account verification purposes.”

But hey, that could never happen to Google, right?