Why Facebook is Better than MySpace

[gothwalk]

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

There’s a lot of talk across the ‘net in the last couple of weeks concerning Facebook. An article from Read/WriteWeb, Is Facebook worth the hype? queries, well, just that.

I’ve been using Facebook for about a week now. I’ve made contact with people I hadn’t heard from in over ten years. Some of my less technically-minded older friends are using it with as much enthusiasm as the kids who can’t remember not having email.

The Read/WriteWeb article essentially questions two things; the stickiness of Facebook and the monetisation.  It notes that (according to the people who run MySpace) MySpace handily beats all comers in nearly every metric: visitors, page views, stickiness, etc.

What’s stickiness? AdServer Solutions says it’s “A performance metric based on the ability of a web site to hold a visitor’s attention. A web site’s stickiness is average duration per user session or per unique visitor.”

MySpace is “sticky” in those terms precisely because it’s badly designed, badly put together, and hard to navigate. Most MySpace profiles look like they were ripped directly from GeoCities around 1997. You have to spend a long time on MySpace because getting to the information you want takes time. On Facebook, by contrast, the information you want is there on the homepage, and a few clicks gets you pretty much everything else necessary. Facebook’s design is better, cleaner, and more usable, and over time, that is going to make a difference.

As for monetisation, well… Facebook’s ad placement is, putting it kindly, sub-optimal. They’re currently using untargetted ads, placed low on the left-hand side of pages. Once they start to target ads based on what’s in user’s profiles (and why they’re not doing this already is a mystery to me), and place the things a bit better, their advertising benefits are going to rocket.

In my opinion, MySpace’s days are numbered, and Facebook will win out - at least until the next big thing.

Comments

[hkim.livejournal.com]

All good points but you've overlooked the main reason why I think MySpace is such a success - youth culture buy-in. MySpace is absolutely the behemoth of social networking sites and I don't think it's going to go anywhere anytime soon no matter how much college graduates and professionals use it to hook up with old friends and arrange barbecues.

IIRC, print magazines Nylon and i-D have both done MySpace music issues in the past 12 months. Nearly always with nightclubs and bands their URL is a MySpace. As long as innovators and early adopters (and I mean that in the "hipster" sense rather than the Web 2.0 sense) are still using MySpace at a critical mass, I think it will remain the biggest and most lucrative of them all, no matter how downright annoying and badly designed it is.

[socmot.livejournal.com]

I think the big question for MySpace is whether it can continue to pull people in over the next few years. If the current members leave school or college and get jobs and the like they may decide MySpace is no longer what they want - as you say, it's a youth culture oriented community - they may move on from MySpace. If this happens and MySpace can't retain numbers from new members, it may reduce in size to a core membership.

FaceBook might pick up these people, or more likely, the next big thing will come along.

[(Anonymous)]

First time I ever set eyes on MySpace it hurt my eyes, I couldn't believe the mess in there, I had no idea how it was supposed to work or even what it was for. Personally it would insult my integrity as a web developer if I was ever forced to sign for it.

As for facebook, it also took me a while to work out what it did. As it turns out, it's quite useful to connect with friends but then it's like LJ, if they don't update their status / write on your wall or whatever, it's hard to fell "in touch". Still it's not too difficult to grasp, even if I think 3/4 of their applications are pretty useless and childish

[loupblanc.livejournal.com]

sorry that was me, I thought I was still logged in... *sigh*

[slovobooks.livejournal.com]

Some of my less technically-minded older friends are using it with as much enthusiasm as the kids who can’t remember not having email.

That's me in a nut-shell, then!