That’s nice! Mine charges $12 a pop, those fuckers. (My grad school’s are free, though.)
Both of my institutions are public universities. (I did my undergrad at one of the campuses of the University of California, and I’m a grad student at the University of Michigan.) I wonder if that has something to do with it.
When Facebook was college only, it felt like a resort. At that same time, My Space felt like a rundown hotel on the bad side of town. I got a MS account because not all of my friends could join Facebook. Now that they can, I no longer use MS.
Could be, mine were both private.
Yeah. Remember when you could see what classes your friends were taking? That was cool. Now it’s just everybody jabbering up status updates about where they want last, or their inane political views. I have a FB account because I signed up in college when only 10 or so schools were on the network, but I’m not big on it anymore. Unfortunately, FB is the easiest way to get hold of certain people, so I’ll use it for that.
This actually came up in a business class I took recently. apparently, Facebook’s board decided to open the source code for free to anyone who wanted to make apps and such. The gambit worked, and once there was a reason to go on a site that was no frills, with a clean layout, people started catching on.
I think originally people though Facebook was just for college students.
MySpace user pages tended to be cumbersome to browse, very garish. That kept many people from embracing it.
I think Facebook’s true power is that people use their actual names. That makes it super easy to find all your friends and family. I joined Facebook a few years ago before a high school reunion. I found out most of my classmates weren’t on Classmates.com, they were on Facebook, which was free and a much better site.
Speaking of Classmates.com, does anyone even use that anymore? I still get e-mails from them all the time from when I signed up with them ages ago, but I haven’t so much as glanced at it in at least five years. With Facebook providing essentially the same service for free, I don’t know how it can stay in business.
An acquaintance of mine runs a fairly heavy traffic Irish based messageboard and community and he says that facebook and twitter have taken away a huge amount of his traffic and that seems to be the case across the board with other community websites. Most of the things one did on his site (or classmates.com) can be done easier and more effectively using facebook. It is kinda scary the way facebook is becoming the internet for many people.
The reason I stopped using myspace is because it gave users too much freedom to customize their page. They could have music playing, animated graphics, and really clashing colors and background images. It was like the geocities of the mid 90s. Facebook has the same template for EVERYONE, and external apps can be blocked. I think this was a big part of what made it more attractive to use.
Hasn’t stopped Craigslist (from what I hear-Wired article a few months back).
I started with Bebo. I liked being able to choose my own skin & it was so easy to use. But so many peoples accounts got hacked & it started adding stupid applications like Facebook has. I think only very young teens use Bebo over here now.
I signed up for Classmates.com way back when during a free trial weekend or something, and realized that the sort of people who signed up are almost by definition the people you didn’t want to get in touch with again. 
Lots of MySpace pages look awful and take ages to load.
Facebook pages look neat-ish and consistent, and load instantly.
MySpace functionality seems a mess. It just doesn’t work.
Facebook functionality seems largely well-implemented, with occasional glitches. It just works (mostly).
MySpace is an old trend with fading appeal and a ‘yesterday’s news’ vibe.
Facebook is popular and growing, and it’s becoming the norm to expect people to be on it.
If you’re on MySpace, you’re one of 3 people:
Kids that just want to blog about how much their life sucks because they’re FAILING GYM!!!
Old people that are so far behind the curve that they’re just now hearing about it.
Hookers and porn stars that spam friend requests to everyone.
I switched from MS to FB because that’s where my friends were. Sure, they might have been on MS too, but unless their name and pic was obvious, how did I know who they were?
I read/heard a theory that FB is popular with people who really did go to college and that MS is still very popular with mostly younger kids who haven’t gone yet, so their friends are still on MS so they stay on MS. And that those kids don’t have other web pages or blogs, so the whole customize thing is really a big deal.
I think classmates really screwed themselves by being a horrible site charging way too much money and being slightly better than a scam. They could have been what FB is because people were networked by their real names and everyone had heard of it, lots of people used it. I think they’re a great example of what NOT to do online, how to alienate your users, how to completely avoid trends.
I’m 27 now, so I’m the right age to have done a lot of my growing up along side the internet and watch it develop from a niche interest when I was in my early teens to the ubiquitous resource and service that it is today. When myspace came out in 2003 or so it was seen very much in my peer group as a thing for attention-seeking young teens to show off pictures of themselves and collect hundreds of anonymous “friends”.
When facebook emerged a couple of years later with its genesis in the American college system and what seemed to be established networks of genuine friends/classmates, it seemed to be much more for us. I imagine there was a very large untapped market that felt the same way.
As someone mentioned upthread, I think a lot of this is to with Facebook using real names. It was one of the first sites that seemed it was less for “internet people” than it was for regular people using the internet, if that makes sense? I also loved (and still do) the photo sharing/tagging system - it’s a great way to keep up with what everyone’s doing, without being tedious or intrusive about it, and it’s great for reminiscing about old holidays and nights out and such. I think that was something that was unique to facebook at the time.
Funnily enough, when I opened my morning paper the first major article was on the death of bebo. As stated in the article it seems to have been inordinately popular in Ireland for a time, but facebook has destroyed all competition here it would seem.
I came into this thread to mention this. I might dig out my password, see if there is anything I want to keep & close the account.