Far be it for me to suggest that Rupert Murdoch has thrown a tanty over Facebook toppling his own MySpace as the leading social networking site, but comments from the media supremo that Facebook is simply the “flavour of the month” and little more than a “directory” seem to reflect more sour grapes than reality. While there is undoubtedly an element of Facebook being the newer and more popular kid on the block since opening up beyond university networks a little while ago, I think it’s also more the case that the site simply looks better than MySpace. I can’t think of a single businessperson I know, for example, who uses MySpace to promote themselves. When I think of Facebook, meanwhile, I can think of dozens upon dozens of people I know who promote themselves and/or their businesses with the tool. Facebook wins its users by appealing to school-age children through to the elderly through its sheer simplicity, while MySpace seems to rapidly lose touch with people beyond the age of 20 who have gotten over the need to be imaginary best friends with their favourite band and who desire an entry for themselves on the Internet that doesn’t look like it was put together by someone with absolutely no sense of design.
Facebook topples MySpace - at last
June 24th, 2008 by Rob Irwin · 2 Comments
Tags: Social Media Trends
2 responses so far ↓
1 Laurel Papworth // Jun 25, 2008 at 10:24 am
A short version, cos I wrote indepth on my blog.
MySpace has 113 million bloggers. Facebook has none. There are no blogs on Facebook, it’s about passing the word around. MySpace is a content social site, and usually OPEN. Facebook is a distribution (newsfeed anyone?) and usually GATED (as in, gated community). MySpace (since mid ‘06) has been primarily over 35’s and women. (only 20 odd percent are between 18 and 25). We need to throw off old myths and get new ones. (Check CommScore research and MySpace PR site).
We blog on one site and distribute on another. If Myspace is losing members, it’s not due to Facebook. It just means people are blogging elsewhere (wordpress or blogger) and distributing elsewhere (Facebook ). More likely, blogging takes too long, whereas Facebook is a quick update. Twitter anyone?
2 Rob Irwin // Jun 26, 2008 at 11:31 am
I think people are definitely using shorter and punchier forms of communication, Laurel. It seems every second friend of mine these days is using Twitter within and without Facebook! And, of course, there are other ways people communicate within Facebook which can’t be called blogging, per se, but which are virtually the same thing. My wife, for example, has started a group about her new life in Australia (she’s American), and posts discussion points on it, just like a blog. The difference, as you have noted, is that such interactions can sometimes be of a closed nature. But MySpace isn’t always open, either, as you also note. In terms of some of the numbers you cite in your reply, call it the old IT journo in me, but personally I take ‘em with a grain of salt. I’ve seen Gina Fung comment that MySpace supposedly has 113 million blogs out of 171 million users, but how many of these users are still active, either as users or bloggers? Some sites get away with murder when they cite everyone who has ever signed up for their service, portraying them as seemingly active users when the actual number would have to be different. I don’t use my MySpace profile anymore, for example, yet I’d be counted in those figures. In a similar vein, there’s a very popular MMORPG out there which cites a userbase based on everyone who has ever played its game and/or tried a demo version of it. While it undoubtedly has a “large” userbase in general terms, the figures it cites are extremely rubbery. This stuff happens all over the place, in every industry. Something my editors used to pump into me as a cadet journalist was not to automatically believe figures - especially when they come from a PR source! Which, in turn, has helped me in my PR career, to always have “real” figures to hand so that when journalists do their job and go poking and prodding, my clients not only have the answers the journalist seeks, but also look credible, by not ducking and weaving and citing figures that even a rudimentary analysis can poke big holes in.
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