I know next to nothing about sites of this sort and would like to start an open-ended discussion of which you guys prefer, and why. What are the advantages/disadvantages of each? Or, suggest another site that you like and tell us why. The first thing you might ask of me is, “what do you intend to get out of joining such a site?”, in which case I would answer, I have no idea, so as not to limit the conversation in any way.
Definitely Facebook. The interface and design is far better than MySpace, and it’s a much more buzzing atmosphere than MySpace will ever be. MySpace is on it’s way out, IMO.
What you might get out of it depends on your nature. I’m not in to social sites that much, but it is a great “hub” to stay in touch with the people you don’t normally see. It’s also great for connecting with long lost friends. Just last week, I was contacted by two friends from the 5th grade! And even more for High School. So it’s really cool to share photos, make comments on their “walls” and keep your page up to date with info you want to make public.
I use Facebook because that’s what my friends use. It’s the most popular site in Sweden for these kinds of thing.
I live in Cyprus at the moment so I use it to see what’s happening with my friends and acquaintances.
I never liked MySpace. I do tolerate Facebook. I don’t use the games or the apps, and find it annoying when people send them to me. It’s a good interface for keeping up with your friends and associates though.
My daughter likes Facebook. I have a blogpage over at SparkPeople.com, which is a free website to help people lose weight and get healthy. I’m a little at sea sometimes with the protocol…I have people who “friend” me, but I have no clue who they are. They aren’t a member of any of my teams, I haven’t interacted with them, all I know is that So and So has friended me. I will usually shoot a PM or an e-mail to someone when I friend them, letting them know how they came across my radar. But these random people who come out of nowhere…who am I to them that they would want to be my friend?
Facebook is basically a phone book. It seems to be good for finding people you already know.
MySpace seems to be more useful for networking; that is, finding people with similar interests that you don’t already know.
I prefer What.
Myspace is great if you like looking at horribly garish pages with stupid music blaring in the background. xkcd: Myspace pretty well sums it up. It’s also full of stupid crap like being able to put your friends in order of priority, just so everybody knows where they stand.
Haaate Myspace. Eye-wrenching pages and horrible damn music that starts unbidden and won’t go away.
Loooove Facebook. I’ve found almost all the people I wanted to get back in touch with from high school, summer camp, etc. And it’s easy to ignore the 95% you don’t care about.
I have both; Myspace is a lot sillier than Facebook, but it can be fun. For a lot of the reasons that it’s annoying, i.e., you can customize your page, add slideshows, music, etc…
Whereas Facebook is a more “grown-up” version wherein everyone’s page looks the same. And on Facebook you can only find people you already know; if you are looking to make new friends you’re much better off with Myspace.
I would venture to guess that if you joined both, you’d find yourself using whichever one your friends use most. If you find more friends on Facebook, you’ll be on there more often…as with Myspace.
FTR everyone was on Myspace for awhile and now everyone’s on Facebook, so I find myself there more often than I used to.
If I were you I’d sign up for both, play with them, and see which one you like best. They’re both free and user-friendly and you’ll be surprised at the people you’ll re-connect with.
Myspace makes me want to punch a nun.
It’s like the worst of the “Do Not” lists that used to be around when HTML was first getting big and everyone was making their own webpages.
- Garish/clashing backgrounds and text colours (lime green and pink, black and fuchsia stripes etc.)? Check.
- Animated backgrounds/images that are badly coded and take ages to load? Check.
- Embedded media files such as music/videos that clash with music you’ve already got playing/ blare out of your speakers unexpectedly? Check.
Just because you *can *put in a sparkly pink background with pumpkin orange text and FallOutBoy’s latest tracks on rotation doesn’t mean you should.
I’m not really a fan of facebook either. The pages are less eye-bleeding, but with all the widgets and requests and updates, I find it very cluttered and hard to follow sometimes. But husband has facebook and convinced me to sign up, and then a bunch of my old school friends found me and started friending me, so on the rare occasions that I do any of this social networking stuff, Facebook is my preference.
Sure, there is a lot of stupidity on Myspace, but if you’re an adult and network with other adults, you don’t run into as much of the annoying/stupid stuff on there as you do if you’re looking at the teenagers’ webpages on there.
I joined it because I wanted to meet new folks and find new bands to listen to, and it did allow that. I just refuse friend requests from stupid people and have disabled the ability of bands to friend request me automatically. It’s just a fun little diversion.
Ask your friends what site they use. I started a Facebook in spring 2008, but hardly ever used it. I didn’t really see the point. Now I am in school again and practically everyone in my cohort uses it. We use it to plan parties, ask if anyone’s interested in having a study session, etc. It’s really good at that sort of thing. But without that, it’d be pointless.
I hate all of the apps, though. I just ignore them.
Xanga is still alive and well. It may not have the mega traffic of myspace or facebook, but that’s not all together a bad thing…
I prefer myspace, but have both. One good thing about facebook is that you can chat (IM) with your friends right there in the web browser, without having to download a separate IM program like on myspace. However, the only reason I use facebook’s IM is because my friend’s boss won’t let her use real IM software at work, but of course web browsing is okay.
I prefer myspace for precisely the reasons everyone here hates it: You can do whatever you want with your own page. Sure facebook guarantees that you won’t run across garishly ugly pages, but that means everyone’s page is equally bland and boring. Also, you can allow anyone you want to look at your myspace page, while facebook is restricted to only your friends. Oh yeah, all the apps suck.
Of course, since they’re both free, you should try them both out. Also, they’re kind of pointless if you don’t have friends, so whichever site the majority of your friends use is probably the way to go.
I succumbed to peer pressure and actually have both. Does this mean that a potential employer cannot “search” for my name or email on Facebook?
For those who hate the Facebook apps and widgets, there are some neat Greasemonkey scripts (if you’re using Firefox) that strip out those and the so-and-so has become a fan of news feed stories.
Depends on your privacy settings. You can set different settings for different parts of your profile, and there are separate privacy settings for searches - you can set it so that only friends of friends, members of the same network, etc, can look you up (and even then you can restrict which bits of your profile they can see).
It’s not massively user friendly, but it is very granular, so if you set it correctly you should have no privacy problems. Oh, and you’d want to make sure you switch off your public search listing (which shows up in other websites) - I think it’s off by default.
All they’ll see is your picture and a button to add you as a friend. You can do the same thing on myspace (make your page private), but it isn’t automatic like on facebook.
I didn’t know it was possible to open up your facebook page to more than just those in your network, but Crusoe implies that it can be done. (By saying that you can restrict your page to only those in your network.)
I’m not really an expert on facebook, though.
Yep - see Settings > Privacy Settings > Search Privacy