Interesting little bit about the exodus from Myspace to Facebook. I’ve noticed the same — Myspace seemed to really be poppin in 2006, when I was working in publishing and had all sorts of friends on their own business ventures, with music profiles and promotion profiles and whatnot. I don’t know if it’s different to me now because my life is different, but all those people are still on my friends list and yet the few times I do log into Myspace these days, there are virtually no updates — no messages, no friends requests, no bulletins (except from the bands), pretty much nothing.
I think it’s a moot point to argue about the aesthetics of either one at this point. Myspace may have always been terribly ugly and sluggish, but Facebook isn’t trailing too far behind. The layout of the front page is cluttered and makes it difficult to find anything you actually want to read — at the very least, the Myspace front page was divided into clean sections. Facebook is also bloated with third-party apps and advertisements, and you still have to opt out of certain emails individually. I didn’t join Facebook to be invited to your stupid zombie fight, so I shouldn’t have to tell Facebook that I don’t want emails about it. In fact, even though Myspace was unbearably ugly, it did offer one cool thing that Facebook still doesn’t have: the ability to create and distribute original content. You could read your friends’ blog posts, listen to your friends’ music, etc.
But the thing I still struggle with is the basic nature of social networking. I remember my friends touting Facebook because the atmosphere lent itself to more discretion — your profile was automatically set to private (at least back then it was), and I think it was perceived as less rude to decline friend requests there. Myspace was the equivalent to going to a sleazy club to meet people while Facebook was like going to a coffee shop or library. It seems stupid now, especially because I’d argue that Facebook is now worse than MySpace in that regard. I’ve acquired at least a dozen “friends” through high school search — and these are people I wasn’t even friends with in high school. And a lot of real life relationships have spilled over into it, which I’m still kind iffy about — I find I censor myself mainly for coworkers, religious fanatics, and my mom.
I don’t know, I guess I just find it useless to argue which is better from a user standpoint because, while one may have had a better business plan than the other, they both essentially serve the same purpose and therefore carry the same set of rules in the social sphere. It’s a bad look to decline your boss’s friend request no matter what app you prefer. People will still post stupid, uninformed things in their status updates, and people will still find a way to make perfectly uniform profiles totally unbearable to look at. If one declines in popularity, all the people who left will just flock to the other service until something new comes along. Then that something new will eventually be ruined socially just as well.
So, while Myspace is being hailed as the new Geocities, and Facebook is basically the new Myspace, does that make Twitter the new Facebook?
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