I happened to be reading a review of the Social Network today. It has struck me that virtually every article or review about this film has mentioned the fact that it narrates the creation of the “revolutionary” social networking site, and demonstrates how Facebook has “changed life as we know it”, etc., etc. Basically, all the reviews say that Facebook was a ground-breaking, radical innovation that has single-handedly (or “single-sitedly”) changed our lives.
But wait…didn’t Facebook only become popular AFTER MySpace?
The way I remember it, MySpace was a huge, wildly popular success, and Facebook was (at least in the beginning) an also-ran. I’d heard of it, but didn’t use it because who needs TWO social networking sites? Eventually, I discarded my MySpace page and switched over to FB for several reasons -
MySpace was too heavily geared towards college kids, and FB seemed more like an ‘all-ages’ networking site (and as a result, I felt less like a creepy chicken-hawk going on it.)
I had grown exasperated by the amount of obvious spam ‘friend requests’ I was receiving - No Brianna, Krystle, Kelli, Tiffani, Alexis and Amber, I do NOT want to be friends or see your “more revealing shots” on your other web page.
MySpace was owned by Rupert Murdock’s News Corp. - and I would generally like to have as little association with the purveyors of Fox News as possble.
Ironically, two of those three reasons of course are problems I have with Facebook. But anyway, my point is…why is Facebook getting all the accolades for being such a ground-breaking, revolutionary, paradigm-shifting phenomenon and MySpace is seemingly forgotten?
Because nobody wants to give Myspace credit. And why would they? Myspace fucking sucks. I’ve yet to delete my Myspace account but I hardly use it these days. The user homepage (not the page you get when you type www.myspace.com, but the one you get when you click “home”) is horrible. Absolutely horrible. They had a good thing for a while near the beginning and tried to make it better by cramming as much shit as they could into it.
No. Facebook was expressly limited to college students originally. Myspace was for all people.
Because Myspace was forgotten. Nobody uses it anymore. MySpace had 66 million users this summer, Facebook had half a billion. It’s not like anyone has ever said that social networking was technologically remarkable. It’s a social construct and whatever it’s managed to accomplish has been in that context. Number of users, hours per month spent visiting, awareness of what Facebook is. Myspace never accomplished what Facebook has on the same scale. Neither did Friendster.
This. Too many bells and whistles.
If you worked in the creative field, I could see how MySpace would be useful as a marketing tool because of the extent to which it allowed you to personalize your profile (and as such it makes sense that those folks are among the site’s last holdouts). But let’s face it. Most other people are horrible Web page designers.
The profile pages became ugly and tough to navigate. They looked as if someone had literally just thrown a bunch a stuff at the wall (think what your typical Geocities site looked like circa 1998) and on some it seemed like you had to scroll down forever to be able to post a comment or send a message.
Facebook has a nice clean design that allows for a fair degree of personalization, but not much clutter. Simply put, it’s just easier to navigate and nicer to look at.
MySpace at minimum is still the very least one needs to easily book jobs as, for example, a musician (solo or band). I don’t think it’s gone anywhere, even though many established groups or musicians have their own domain name. People who book for bars, clubs, parties, don’t want to listen to CDs as a rule – they want a site where they can check out a handful of samples, see graphics relating to the stage show one’s likely to put on. It’s not the cutting edge, but it’s something everyone understands, both employers and contract-workers like musicians, and it’s hard to see it disappearing completely.
AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHGGGGGGGHHHHHHH! NNNNNOOOOOOOOO! MY BRAIN!
Facebook did accomplish what no other social networking site did. It made it simple enough that people of all stripes could use it. It has many users who never would have touched MySpace (Hi, Mom!).
Pus it has Farmville, which accounts for about 499,999,999 of the user base.
As has been mentioned, MySpace is still a great tool for music artists, I would consider having a MySpace page essential for upcoming acts because most people know their way around one and it’s an easy way to have sound, photos, information etc. all on one familiar page.
Of course you can do that on other sites (including just, you know, making your own website) but MySpace is still the best known of these outlets.
^True, but most bands I know have Facebook pages that link to their MySpace. People are actually on Facebook enough to get recommendations by friends.
I also have not noticed “whoring” as much on Facebook–you know, when you would join a group just to get more friends, and you were required to “pimp” their profile every so often. If you did, you’d get more friends. That’s how ordinarly people got such high numbers. I experimented with it. What sucked is I met exactly one cool person.
What about LiveJournal? Seemed like it was very popular among Dopers in the early 2000s. It later got a reputation for being populated by emos and goths. Now, it’s mostly forgotten.
What did MySpace ever have to offer that you couldn’t do with a generic webpage on any host whatsoever? Near as I can tell, the only difference with MySpace was that it made it much easier to turn your page into a hideous mess. It really only enabled social networking in the same sense that the World Wide Web, as a whole, enabled social networking.
There seemed to be a few years there, maybe 2005-2008, where MySpace pages for music artists took the place of their own websites. It has all the basics - music player, tour dates, photos, etc. so many bands didn’t bother to update two sites. Not for all of course, but many indie artists who didn’t have big companies truly running their websites. However, these past couple of years, as facebook took over as the most popular site, bands have gone back to having their own sites.
Facebook was very exclusive at first. You not only had to be in college, you had to be in specific colleges. When you created your account, you would put in your crn number and it would set up groups with other people in your classes that semester. There were no status updates, chat, applications, or anything like that. It was mostly a way to get in touch with people in your classes. The only profiles you could view were people that went to your school. If you wanted to view profiles from other schools, you had to put them in your friends list.
Everyone that was on My Space without a college email address wanted access to Facebook. Once it went public, they all were finally able to migrate.
Every teenager I have ever heard of has a Facebook account. I’d bet a lot of money that a higher percentage of teenagers have Facebook accounts than non-teens. In fact, Facebook was started for teens and people in their early 20’s. Myspace was really good for one thing and that was for promoting bands, most of whose members were not teenagers.
Actually, I met my girlfriend on Myspace and we were in our 40s at the time. That was kind of a fluke though and neither of us have even logged on to our Myspace accounts in a couple of years at least.
If you check out this infographic from June 2010, (near the bottom) you will see that you are very wrong about the percentage of teens vs non-teens. Facebook-Statistics
Add to that the fact that women age 55 and up, are the fastest growing FB demographic in America.
The search capabilities on Facebook are far superior to MySpace for adults who are searching for old friends from school. At age 52, being able to reconnect with old friends I havent seen or heard from for decades, I consider Facebook a priceless tool. Unless there has been some recent change, MySpace has nothing to compare to the Facebook friend search.
That’s all very nice but I didn’t say a thing about percentage of users who are teens versus non-teens. Obviously there are more non-teen users because there are way more non-teens in the world.
Let me put it another way. If X% of the teens in the world have a facebook account and Y% of the non-teens in the world have a facebook account, X is greater than Y.
