A couple of months ago, in an article titled, “Are social networks worth the effort?”, Chris Crawford raised the question: “Are you bombarded with requests to join Linkedin.com, Facebook.com, MySpace.com, Twitter.com? If not, are you at least curious as to what these things are?”
Social networks, blogs, and all manner of “Web 2.0” options have rapidly transformed how people interact with each other online.
Chris focused on LinkedIn, a social network that focuses more on business networking. Meanwhile, Daria Topousis has contributed several articles about Twitter. These and all the past Tech Beat articles are archived on the Redwood Technology Consortium Web site at www.redwoodtech.org. I'd like to now move on to discuss Facebook and MySpace.
Facebook and MySpace are social networking places where people can share all kinds of things about themselves online. The differences between these two networks are significant, though.
I interviewed everyone I know who uses both Facebook and MySpace. What I found, in a nutshell, is that folks consider MySpace a place they can express themselves more freely, whereas they consider Facebook a place they can be more private amongst friends and family. The differences here have everything to do with how these two sites work.
Facebook is more private. There is very little the outside world can see about you without being part of your network. They can see a profile image of
MySpace can be much more public. The whole world could see just about everything you post here, if you choose to allow it. Again, you can share photos, videos, your interests, etc. but MySpace has more of an actual blog option. MySpace is much more “voyeuristic” - an adjective many interviewees used.
MySpace is a place where you can really express your personality. MySpace lets you have a lot of control over how you present yourself - including customizing just about everything about the look of your profile page. You can also very easily find some of your favorite music and post it right to your profile and have it play when your profile page loads.
Facebook offers almost no options to personalize the look of your profile and has only just added some features to share your favorite music with your friends. What's more, the friends I interviewed who were musicians unanimously pressed the point that MySpace was a much more effective network for them to promote their music.
The most significant difference between the two, though, is that Facebook is much more of a networking machine. MySpace is more of a place to present yourself. Part of your MySpace profile is a space where friends can leave you messages, but Facebook is almost completely focused on networking with your friends. Your Facebook home page shows you at a glance what your friends are sharing (MySpace is now doing something similar). Your profile page (or “wall”) shows what you are sharing; it's essentially a dialog between you and your friends about your thoughts, your photos, your videos, your links, etc. You can even post events to your wall.
What's more, Facebook is fairly effective in recommending people that you might want to “friend up” with, pages you may want to become a fan of, or causes you may want to join. Your friends will also recommend these things to you. You can also send private messages to your friends, or even chat with them if they happen to be online and logged into Facebook at the same time. There is almost no end to the interactivity on Facebook. I also found that Facebook has a much wider age demographic than MySpace.
By way of illustration, I started my MySpace profile about three years ago, customized it to my personality, and have done very little with it since then. I only started a profile on Facebook this year, and am constantly involved with the goings-on there. With Facebook “you get way more insight into your friends' lives,” to quote one of the friends I interviewed.
Neither social network is better than the other; they are just different (though they are becoming more like each other). There is much more to say about these and other social marketing sites. I'll be adding more to this conversation here as time and space allows, as I am sure other members of the Redwood Technology Consortium will do, too.
Sean Connors is the owner of and chief project manager for Web Merchant Services, and a business member of the Redwood Technology Consortium.
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