Facebook, MySpace are more different than most give them credit for

You hear it regularly. “MySpace is dead. Everyone is going to Facebook.” But the same article I mentioned in the last post makes a point that few too people consider as they lump them together.

MySpace is a space for your interests—like music or movies, and it’s a place to have fun with your personality. I mean, nobody thinks that the avatar in Second Life with the rodent head actually looks like that.

Facebook, on the other hand, started out as the online version of that college directory we all got freshman year. We called it the Pigbook more than the Facebook, but you get the idea. So it was, from day one, about you in a very real way. So instead of being a place for fantasy, it was a place to share a bit about yourself, to connect with friends, to stay in the loop with your group.

To this day, the legacy of both of those formations continues. MySpace was free and open from the beginning—thus the 68 million to 26 million user advantage over Facebook, which started as a tightly controlled community before recently opening up.

It is, and will continue to be interesting to watch growth rates, but in some ways watching the growth of LinkedIn versus the growth of Facebook is more logical.

www.ignitesocialmedia.com