The Rise of Facebook and Fall of MySpace
My personal MySpace page resembles the quintessential Kansas country road. Tumbleweeds and a low-pitched howl of wind. Or better put, it’s a digital ghost town. No one visits anymore, including me. My handful of ‘friends’ are nothing more than the skeletal remains of what was once our place to share our doings – but they also never come around anymore. We all moved to California! Err, wait. Facebook.
Yes, I know many faithful still frequent MySpace and some also refuse to conform and migrate to Facebook like millions of others. If you are a musician or band, MySpace still is great place for self promotion – you can upload and sell your music, something you cannot do through Facebook.
I ran a site comparison at Compete.com of traffic for both Facebook and MySpace over the past two years. Less than 12 months ago their respective traffic was at parity (approximately 59 million unique visitors in December 2008). After that Facebook was off to the races and MySpace continued it’s inevitable decline.
What happened in December of 2008 that caused this tremendous upswing? What does Facebook offer that MySpace does not?
If you would prefer, here is Danah Boyd’s very heady and research driven explanation (a great read!).
Below are 3 reason that immediately come to mind when I ponder this shift.
1. It’s all about conversation
In my opinion, the most distinctive difference between the two is the threaded nature of Facebook. Not only in the fact that a comment to any item becomes a linear conversation – the conversation then is seeded beyond the original poster’s page. Simply seeing items that mutual friends comment on creates a cross pollinated conversation. Many times I have reconnected with old friends through comments on other’s posts.
2. We appreciate consistency
I have never seen two MySpace pages that look alike. Often times they are so cluttered with heavy background images and poorly designed themes I have no idea where to find a user’s blog, photos or anything. Some are a complete disaster and inevitably crash my browser. Sure, people like to customize their online life – add their own flare. But this has a downside that Facebook has capitalized on. Very similar to Bose kiosk and Apple Stores the consistent user experience of Facebook is part of it’s charm.
The good ol’ KISS Principle (Keep It Simple Stupid) bleeds through the entire experience from signup to customization. By adhering to a very unified and clean interface, Facebook immediately differentiated itself from MySpace.
3. Keep out!
Around the time when MySpace was under tremendous heat by media outlets because of stalkers, sexual predators and creeps in general – many users opted to ‘lockdown’ their profiles. If you are not someone’s friend you basically can only see a name and photo. Fair enough, you should be careful of what personal information you share publicly. But let’s say you would like to use MySpace for networking purposes and allow certain profile areas visible to search and browse. No dice. Again, this is where Facebook trumps the other. It’s variable privacy settings are highly customizable and a god-send for those of us with ‘mixed-company’ in our personal networks. I can pick and chose what items I’d like to share within my networks, groupings of friends or simply cherry-pick friends that I’d like to share photo albums with. Brilliant!
So, what else can we contribute to this change?
Will MySpace be around in 5 years? If so, what will sustain it? I’d love to hear your thoughts!