I don’t know anyone who uses Myspace. I don’t use it (I have a profile that I created years ago that I haven’t done anything with in a long time) and I never hear people talking about it. Facebook, on the other hand, seems omnipresent. I use it every day, and everyone I know is on it. All of my friends, my parents, my grandparents…chances are, if I meet someone, they are on Facebook.
Facebook has a simple and easy-to-use interface, and the search engine is user friendly and the profiles are easy to look at and everything loads quickly.
Myspace is convoluted and confusing, filled with elaborate custom pages with graphics that freeze your computer; it’s like a big joke. I don’t know anyone who takes it seriously.
Has Facebook effectively won this war? Or was there never any war to begin with, and the two sites fill two separate niches?
Facebook has, AFAIK, mostly supplanted Myspace. Myspace was going really well there for quite a few years before Facebook took over. They’re both doing better than Friendster, though.
See, this is why I don’t like social networking pages: one becomes popular, then another does, then another does, then another does. In the meantime, you’ve got friends going, “Oh, add me on Friendster.” A few months later: “Oh, I don’t use Friendster anymore. I’m on Myspace now.” Next year: “Oh, I don’t use either anymore. I’m on Facebook now.” Pathetic. I refuse to participate in something so ridiculous.
Myspace wasn’t intended to be a social network, per se, it was originally designed to be a place for indie bands to advertise their existence. But it very quickly evolved away from that.
Well, I say evolved, but it seems to me the site itself didn’t change one jot, it just got a lot busier with new signups who had their own agenda.
The page design, clearly made by someone who had no clue about what CSS was, or even a particularly solid grasp of how to use HTML, has remained unchanged almost from day one, and remains an embarrassment.
Facebook, however, was social networking from the ground up, and tried to do it right. The recent change in privacy settings seems to be the big mis-step that may be the turning point for it to be superseded by some new thing, though, perhaps by whatever Twitter evolves into.
Myspace’s primary function, of purveying music, is still better than anything I can get on facebook. Myspace is still popular amongst certain groups of people, and hasn’t died a death as much as previous SN sites, like friendster, bebo et al. However, in terms of activity and number of users facebook has won. I actually find facebook far more convoluted than myspace to use but have found that apart from other musicians ther aren’t all that many people using myspace as before. I’ve started a music facebook page but am not interested in the SN side of things as much.
It will be interesting to see if there is a next big thing that supplants facebook. Twitter is “cooler” although doesn’t have the same function as other SN sites.
I’m in my twenties but I’m behind the curve. I recently signed up for Facebook, but I haven’t done much yet. As far as I can tell, its main purpose is to let you see how fat the girls you knew in elementary school have become.
Faceboook has over 300 million members. You bet it’s supplanting Myspace. Also, I suspect any new service won’t be able to make a dent in it. Think AIM – 90% of IMs are on it, and other services can’t get a foothold (though, theoretically they could if AIM keeps its promise and allows interoperability).
As for Twitter, there are more people on Facebook playing Farmville than are signed up for Twitter. Facebook has the same function as Twitter, anyway – plus much more.
You probably know this, but the new privacy settings are FB’s reaction to Twitter’s popularity. It is an attempt to open up some of FB’s user’s data in order to create Twitter-like functionality.
Regarding the OP: FB has certainly supplanted MySpace. MySpace rose to the #1 spot by attracting younger users; users that had plenty of time to create their own customized pages. It developed a bad rap as being a place with awful, ugly pages and overrun with teenagers. At some point, older users wanted to join the social networking craze and FB appealed to them, partly because it was trivial to set up a page and partly because it was not MySpace. FB moved to #1 because there are a lot more older users out there.
Also remember that Facebook was originally only supposed to be used by students and you had to have a valid .edu email address to sign up. You were automatically linked with that school’s network. If I remember correctly, it was difficult to even interact much with people outside that network. That has obviously since changed and that has led to an large influx of non-students, corporations, etc.
Are you (or someone) able to please flush this out in a bit more detail?
What are Twitter users able to do that Facebook users aren’t able to do, and what were the new “privacy settings” that Facebook introduced to help them compete with Twitter?
The most important part of twitter is that you have nothing to say that is longer than 140 characters. The second most important part of twitter is that the pithy things you say are incredibly easy to find and propagate. If I want to know if someone has been twittering about cherry pie lately, I can just do a search and find any twats written about cherry pie.
You can’t do that on facebook, you have to actually know people or have met them or a friend at one point and learned their name. Then, only after you friended them, can you wait and wait and wait hoping that one day they have something to say about cherry pie. They’re trying to open things up so they’re more public like people’s twits.
What it came down it is that no matter what computer I was on I usually hesitated to click on anyone’s MySpace link for fear of auto-music starting, animations that crash the computer, and backgrounds of pain. Every person’s page would take on average 1-2 minutes to load.
Facebook may be bland by comparison, but at least I know the page will load in seconds so I actually explore what folks are doing/writing.
The only reason myspace is hangin on is music. I am completely baffled why facebook is allowing this to happen. It is a very frustrating time to be in a band right now. Myspace’s treatment of local bands is absolutely disgusting. Say I live in Kansas City. Seems like it would be a pretty intuitive, basic feature to be able to do a search for bands that are on Myspace, that hail from Kansas City, right? Nope, Myspace doesn’t want you to be able to do that. It’s a feature they even once had, but actually decided to take away! This little thing makes a HUGE difference to the potential exposure of a local band.
But Myspace only wants you to listen to bands that pay Myspace to be a “Top ranked” band. It’s a wonder they still let you search for bands by name even. I bet not for long.
Yet for some reason, facebook refuses to become band friendly. I just don’t get it.