Facebook isn’t marketing itself to bands.
Wait, what?
Everyone moved to Facebook because 2ply was convicted of a sex crime. Do pay attention.
Exactly- why not?
I mean it doesn’t have to be their focus. Add a tiny bit of functionality, and Myspace no longer has a purpose for anyone, sex crimes be damned.
All those embedded .mp3s and things take up bandwidth and require lots of shiny happy code and stuff. It’s not like adding that “tiny bit of functionality” is the equivalent of Facebook wearing its hair up today.
Why bother trying to muscle in on a service that doesn’t make money?
Thank you, Fuzzy Dunlop.
I never understood why MySpace didn’t impliment a simple option to allow each user to load any MySpace page without any extra HTML or CSS markup.
Yahoo360 used to allow people to do this, I guess that’s why it folded 
Ha!
Especially when you can get someone else to do it for you?
Only allowing college students gave Facebook that coolness that comes from being exclusive. High school kids would be on Myspace and then see their older brothers and sisters in college using Facebook. To someone in high school, college is the coolest thing ever. So when Facebook opened up to the general public, all those kids jumped to hang out at the cool place and leave Myspace for Facebook. Not that Facebook isn’t just better than Myspace for many good reasons, but the coolness factor was important.
The biggest loser in all of this are sites like classmates.com.
They could have had the success of Facebook years ago if they didn’t attempt to charge people subscription fees. Their greed was their downfall. Everyone thought something like classmates.com would be cool and looked into it but as soon as they wanted you to cough up some money it immediately turned people off.
Now classmates.com is a joke and facebook is soaring.
There are two main differences.
One is the privacy-level of the data. Twitter was intended as micro-blogging. Data posted to Twitter is publicly available to everyone. Anyone can follow your tweets and read your data. You don’t need to accept and you can’t control them. FB was intended as a social network which in comparison only shares your data with people you have explicitly accepted as ‘friends’. So if you post a status message on Twitter, anyone can see it. If you post a status message on FB, only your friends can see it. The new FB privacy settings are an attempt to encourage you to make some of your data (including status updates) public so that they can simulate Twitter feeds. And as Fuzzy said, making this data public means it can be searched as well (both by FB’s internal search tool and by Google).
As an example, a friend of mine was watching an old movie and for the heck of it he searched Twitter for the movie name. Turns out a lot of other people were watching the same movie at the same time and they were tweeting as it played. He thought it was cool.
The second difference is the way the services create connections between people. FB is point-to-point. Person A invites Person B, Person B accepts. Now they are both connected to each other and can see each other’s status. In Twitter, Person A can follow Person B and independently Person B can follow Person A. This means you can let people follow you without having to follow them. Ashton Kutcher can have several thousand people following his every move without his status feed filling up with the thousands of corresponding feeds (which would probably be stuff like “Did you see what Ashton just posted?”). The connections in Twitter are one-to-many instead of one-to-one (or point-to-point).
I think the other motivation FB had with their privacy changes was that they want more of their data indexed and searchable by Google so that when you are looking for details about a particular person or a general person, you are likely to hit FB as your first result.
Exactly. As usual, this Onion article hits the nail on the head.
I don’t know; I probably get 5 emails a week from different local bands advertising their shows. Bands just start a Facebook group, and people join it, and then those members receive information about the band consistently and the Group page functions as a calendar and semi-website for the band. It could definitely be expanded, but as it is now, local bands seem to be benefiting from Facebook and are using it to their advantage.
One about Friendster
It’s been going on for ages - a hundred people did everything but pay me to “get a Livejournal, now!”, then a score of people told me I should be on Myspace or go to hell, then a dozen told me alternately if I wasn’t on Friendster I was committing a hate crime, then half that told me without Facebook I was a drooling Luddite who just hated all human life, and a few firebrands ordered me to be on Blogspot. Meanwhile at work clients demand that I be on Linkedin or else I obviously don’t want their business, while their magnera opera consist of a “vision statement” haiku, a few animated GIFs leaping and cavorting like a Jack Russel terrier on speed, and of course their resume, which is the real reason they wanted me to go to their page.
People go out and spend hundreds or even thousands of hours customizing and tweaking and updating their journals which talk about nothing, creating circles of “friends” and joining groups, then inevitably there comes some sort of psychodrama and they take the burning hulk of their emotions and set sail for the next online networking port. Meanwhile their old haunts hang around like bombed-out cities, with everything but virtual tumbleweeds rolling gently across the pages.
Because I don’t want to be spammed by PMs asking me to come check out your shitty band.
Out of curiosity, 2ply, what sex crime were you convicted of?
You know how anti-same sex marriage people claim if same-sex marriage was made legal, then people would want to have sex with turtles next? Well, I support same-sex marriage but I can’t say their claims are entirerly unfounded.
Because they see that Myspace has that locked up, so there’s no point.
Besides, they want to be a general-use website. If it’s a music site like Myspace people who aren’t interested in discovering new bands might decide to go elsewhere.
Add to this the fact that, for music, Myspace is the equivalent of a vanity press, it’s certainly best that Facebook doesn’t get involved.
That’s different – the music isn’t on Facebook. I am a fan of a couple of bands on Facebook, too, but that’s no different from being a fan of anything else there. Facebook does provide a way for bands to promote themselves to their fans; it just doesn’t put their music there.
You had sex with a turtle. Okay, that I can grok. But you had sex with a turtle and got caught?