Social Media News

A business story in my local newspaper yesterday reported that Facebook has overtaken MySpace in the number of users for the first time since it was founded five years ago. Facebook users totaled 70,280,000 in May; MySpace users totaled 70,250,000.

Perhaps this was not unexpected. MySpace has grown increasingly stodgy, while Facebook offers more interactive features that allows people to interact more freely. That is, when it works. (I've had my problems with Facebook, but as of now I can say that they've since been fixed for good.)

While Facebook offers immediate information and easier interaction for its users, MySpace tried to offer more entertainment content - music downloads, movie previews - that people simply didn't care about. Right now there's a trailer for Sandra Bullock's latest movie, and while I like Sandra Bullock (and will probably like The Proposal, if I get around to seeing it), that's not what I go to social networking sites for. I go to them to communicate with my friends.

That's why I go to Facebook more than anywhere else. I can spend up to thirty minutes at a time there; I'm on MySpace for only a couple of minutes at a time. Most of the people I know in my writers' group are there; by contrast, only one of them is a MySpace friend, and I haven't heard from her in months. (This friend also has a Facebook account.) Several other MySpace friends haven't visited their own sites for weeks, sometimes months; they're too busy congregating on Facebook because it's easier. I communicate with friends of mine with both MySpace and Facebook accounts more often on Facebook, which more people take more seriously.

As for MySpace, no one seems to take that seriously anymore. Statuses and moods haven't been updated on many of my friends's pages for months. Statuses on Facebook, by the way, disappear after a week. Someone who says he's happy on MySpace - because that's what he wrote in March - might be miserable now. If he hasn't updated his Facebook page in over a week, you have no idea how he is.

Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corporation bought MySpace in 2006 and was hailed as a visionary for getting a piece of the Internet social networking action - now looks like a square who can't keep up with the times. Murdoch has vowed to get MySpace - which had to lay off a third of its 1200 or so employees - back on top, but that objective is in doubt. In the brief history of Internet social networking sites, such sites tend to be forgotten once they lose momentum. Friendster, for example, is like a bland sitcom that's been on the air for a decade; no one knows it's there. As I previously noted, I know a married couple who met through Friendster, and they're grateful to it for having found each other. But a married couple having met through Friendster sounds as hip these days as a married couple having met through a Catholic Youth Organization dance.

MySpace may not go the way of CYO dances, but just the fact that they're capable of going the way of Friendster must be frightening to Murdoch and to Tom Anderson, a co-founder of MySpace who immediately becomes your first friend when you sign on. (That might be another reason MySpace is in trouble; becoming friends with one of its leaders automatically might seem creepy to some.) Social networking sites tend to have their moments in the sun, but the ones that succeed stay ahead of the curve. Those that don't do so lose their edge with little hope of regaining it. That's just as true in other businesses - look at all the American and European auto companies still reeling from loss of market share to the Japanese. And, just as GM never quite regained an advantage over Toyota, the evidence of history suggests that MySpace isn't likely to get back its edge over Facebook.

Nevertheless, I plan to keep my MySpace page. Its format is like that of a real Web site, and I use it to promote myself to the outside world; my Facebook page is private. Plus, I love putting up a new music video on my MySpace page every week for people to see; the only way you can keep something up on a Facebook page for a week or longer is to not post anything for awhile. (I inform people of my latest MySpace "Music Video Of the Week" through - you guessed it - Facebook.) These small features might just keep MySpace in the running, if only as an also-ran.

Unlike Friendster, which is just plain out of contention.