17 Sep Quarterlife’s Legacy May Be Site, Not Show
The “Big news out of Hollywood” late last week, when MySpace TV announced that a new Internet-only television show will debut in November, got the info right, but the big picture wrong.
First the info: Called “Quarterlife”, the show is about a 20-something with a blog that shares the life stories of friends worldwide, and the pain that can cause. You can watch the trailer here (with exciting subtitles in Greek even!)
This is a neat idea, and the producers are Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, who did My So-Called Life and thirtysomething for ABC. That’s big news. The 8-minute episodes are likely to get some attention given these producers and the nice alignment between the content and the medium it’s being delivered on.
Now the big picture: If you go to Quarterlife.com right now, you can watch the trailer you see above (without the Greek subtitles). But once the shows debut, the site will be transformed into “a social networking site for creative people.” If they’ve built this site well, this could be the real legacy of Quarterlife over the long-term: a site to replace MySpace as the creative social networking space. MySpace is creaking and a bit ugly, but replacing them is hard.
As I said last week in my post “Why Zooped Sucks“, any MySpace replacement needs a way to push a lot of people into a site very fast or it won’t take off. Maybe that’s what Quarterlife the show will do for Quarterlife.com. If the show takes off, the site will take off (again, if it’s built well), and we might just have our first credible MySpace threat in a while. Ironically, hosted on MySpace TV.
Watch for the first reviews of the Quarterlife site itself. That could be the real news out of all this.
Technorati Tags: social media , myspace , social networking , quarterlife , zooped
