Is Facebook closing the gap on MySpace?
Newsweek’s Jeff Levy wrote an article about his interview with Tom Anderson of MySpace and talked about his son and his classmates mass defection from MySpace to Facebook.
In the article he cites the explosive growth of Facebook, which gaining close to 2 million members a month, while MySpace has been slowed to 500,000 a month. Also there is talk about the amount of time users are spending on each of the sites, something that MySpace used to dominate. According to Andrew Lipsman, “Facebook has caught up.”
Now all of these stats aren’t exactly new, what really stuck out from the article, and got me thinking was something that MySpace said in their defense. That this was a regional anomaly. According to the article Anderson cited, “statistics that showed that their numbers were strong and opined that the exodus might have been a geographical anomaly; East Coasters seem to skew toward Facebook.”
I know we have dug into the whole Facebook vs. MySpace debate here before but the geographical differences reasoning …. well that is new. I want to look into this a bit more I figured I would share it though because I found it interesting.
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POSTED IN: Facebook, News, Social Networking Sites
6 opinions for Is Facebook closing the gap on MySpace?
Susie
Jun 28, 2007 at 8:29 am
I really love Facebook. There was a really great article about it somewhere where Myspace fails and Facebook doesn’t because it’s growing up with the people who originally signed up for Facebook which were mostly university and high school students and making it more “exclusive” rather than anonymous. Myspace is bombarded with advertisements which is at a level where its sickening and I just have to say although I started off at Myspace. I will probably eventually end up on Facebook because ever since Rupert Murdoch took over it has never been the same.
Bert
Jun 29, 2007 at 9:17 am
I love Facebook, too. I left MySpace behind since it has become unusable. However, I am still stuck finding a good site for professional networking. Something like LinkedIn combined with Facebook. Any ideas? I have looked at a few places like Ning, Xing. I came across konnects.com, they claim in a recent PR that they combine Ning/LinkedIn features, looks promising, but haven’t checked them out yet.
Kevin
Jun 29, 2007 at 9:54 am
There has been a lot of hype around a few of the start ups that have a mixtures of features, but the thing is they just don’t have the user bases.
I have seen some setups that are better than linkedin or myspace or whatever network you want to talk about but they just don’t have the users. So you are left with a choice, use a site that you like better or stay where the people are.
Kevin
Jun 29, 2007 at 9:56 am
to interact with my friends personally I will use facebook a little more than myspace. But from a promotion standpoint, nothing compares to myspace.
Susie
Jun 29, 2007 at 10:02 am
I wish all my friends would move over to Facebook! But I think Facebook will eventually catch up to Myspace in terms of networking for business and I think it will be better. But yes I am still using Myspace to promote for now.
Bert
Jun 29, 2007 at 10:06 am
Susie and Kevin you are both right, you need your friends to be members and there need to many members to make a site useful. Let’s hope that the right mix of features will draw attention to the right sites and help them populate with more users. Facebook is clearly attracting people from MySpace because of its uncluttered layout and better features, so other sites should be able to replicate that, but it will take time.
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