King  Gary 

I’m not sure about you, but I’ve definitely been witnessing many people fleeing from MySpace and finding joy over at Facebook, instead, in recent months. It’s also been reported that Facebook is the #1 site for teenagers, and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 22-year-old founder, is profiled in this month’s edition of Fast Company. What I believe are some of the reasons that people are rapidly moving from MySpace to Facebook include:

• The MySpace layout is really cluttered, whereas Facebook’s is really clean. On MySpace, at first, it seems like a lot is going on so it’s exciting. Once you hit a server error for the umpteenth time, though, then it’s quits for MySpace.
• There is a LOT more privacy on Facebook than on MySpace (there are no less than 7 privacy sections found on Facebook, where each has dozens of settings which control things ranging from your profile, to search results that include you.)

I especially think that the ability to set how you know someone whom you’ve added as a Friend on Facebook is a Godsend. This gives much more value to people who are considered ‘Friends’ in your profile, because then you can specify how well and from where you know someone, and you can then filter people using these settings. Want to see who you went to High School with? Then filter your friends using ‘High School Friends’. Want to filter out everyone you know who lives in the same dormitories as you on your university campus? Then use the ‘Housemates’ filter. It’s that easy!

On MySpace, the opposite holds true. Each and every friend that you add decreases every Friend’s value, especially when you’re like a lot of MySpace members who click the ‘Add to Friends’ button as if they had ADHD. It’s a popularity contest on MySpace, plain and simple, especially because the number of ‘Friends’ that you have is more clearly stressed and displayed on MySpace than it is on Facebook. Also, there’s a ‘Top Friends’ list on MySpace, which tends to make being your friend more of a competition than anything else. (On MySpace, the total number of Friends that you have is displayed. On Facebook, it shows the number of Friends that you have within your primary ‘Network’, be it geographical, a university, etc.)

For myself on Facebook, I’ve begun to remove people that I don’t really know too well. Some people added me as a friend a while ago because they were from my university. I didn’t know who they were, so I simply assumed that I knew them from a friend of a friend. Chances are that these people just found me because we attend the same university, though, so they’ll be removed from my Friends list. (Facebook makes it easy to find out who you’ve got as a Friend and that goes to your university!)

vs.

MySpace is beginning to fail as a social network, while Facebook is rapidly gaining ground. Maybe its new MySpace News offering, with its Digg-like features, will boost it back into the limelight once again? Well, probably not.

Which do you prefer to use – MySpace or Facebook? Post your thoughts in the comments and vote on the poll below (if you’re reading this in a feed reader, you’ll have to visit this post in your browser to see the poll)!

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