April29

Face(book) It, MySpace, You Suck

More and more recently, I’ve been becoming a bigger Facebook advocate and a MySpace nay-sayer. However, it’s been a slowly developing thing, mainly because there aren’t quite as many of my friends on Facebook... yet. Here are the 12 reasons why I like Facebook moreso than MySpace.

1. Visual Aesthetics
Facebook is so much better looking than MySpace, it’s ridiculous. MySpace really lives up to it’s name by allowing users to hack their profile and add whatever they want to the site. That’s okay if you don’t want to have your own blog somewhere that’s designed to your liking, but most times it’s annoying and can really slow down the performance of your machine (who needs floating letters anyway?).

Facebook is clean and implores modern design techniques, not to mention white space. Users there aren’t concerned with customizing their page, they’re more concerned with connecting with friends.

2. Usability
On MySpace, have you ever wanted to jump right into your friends list? How about check out photos with one click? Better yet, wouldn’t you like to know if/when your friends change something on their profiles? Those first two tasks on MySpace aren’t quick to do and the third is nearly impossible. On Facebook, all three are simple and there’s more where that came from.

Additionally, Facebook continues to create a better user-experience and also informs users when new things have been incorporated. To me, that’s a LOT better than Tom posting a bulletin saying that something has screwed up and they’re fixing it.

3. No One is Hacking My Account
The way that Facebook is built doesn’t allow users to try and hack into my account. MySpace is built using many sub-domains, which can easily be faked. It’s sad that we had to educate MySpace users that if you were already signed in, you don’t have to log in again – the only thing off limits on MySpace are certain profiles. If you think security had nothing to do with users dumping IE in favor of a more secure Firefox, think again.

4. Private Profiles Annoy Me
Seriously, what’s the point of being on a social web site (a network that connects people, organizations and concepts) if your profile is private? Nothing irritates me more than thinking I can go read someone’s profile and encountering this stupid message:

This profile is set to private. This user must add you as a friend to see his/her profile.

Fine. Whatever. Make your profile private. On Facebook, no one has to worry about seeing that message because you can’t even click on a user’s name if you’re not in their network.

5. Pokes
To address the whole privacy deal on Facebook, if you want to see someone’s profile that you don’t have access to, you “poke” that person. They’re notified of the poke (which is really just a nudge, or a, “hey, what’s up”)and then they have the chance to poke you back. If they do, then you both have the chance to check out each other’s profile for seven days. Now you know who’s looking at your profile.

6. News Feed
The first thing you see when you log in to Facebook is your friends’ news feed – things that your friends have recently done. This includes changes to events, groups, photos, notes, relationships, friends, wall posts, profiles, status and posts. If you have several friends, this can get overbearing – so all you do is go to your preferences and mess with a frequency lever for each category.

7. Even More Privacy
When editing your contact information on Facebook, you can set certain information to be more private than others. Your three options are:

• All of my networks and all of my friends
• Some of my networks and all of my friends (you get to choose which networks)
• Only my friends

8. Blog Incorporation
I never understood why MySpace had it’s own blogging software and no ability to import posts from my blog. I know some people that post entries on their personal blog and ALSO on MySpace. On Facebook, I just tell it what my RSS feed is and it imports them when they’re updated. Integration is key.

9. Less Advertising
When Rupert Murdock bought MySpace for $587M, it was speculated that he was trying to build a network to compete with MTV. I guess the way you combat MTV is by adding an ad anywhere that you can. The kids that watch MTV like tons of shit everywhere, right? We gotta speak to their ADD.

Facebook’s site is virtually ad-free and it makes it so much nicer. That could always change, though, if someone wants to pony up the $8B price tag that Facebook carries.

10. Photo Tagging
Facebook had unlimited photo uploading and albums long before MySpace did. Not only that, but you can order prints of your favorite photos, too. However, the best photo feature on Facebook is the ability to tag photos. That means if I have a photo with Bruno in it, I can associate some meta data on that photo pointing to him and that photo will show up in HIS photo area. You can essentially let others do work for you.

11. Third-Party Developers
It seems that MySpace is locking more and more down recently and disallowing users to include things in their profile (like flash photo albums, music players, etc.) – maybe in response to hackers? Whatever the cause, it’s annoying. Facebook takes an opposite approach and like other Web 2.0 sites, it’s opened up it’s API and allows developers to create their own plug-ins. Now you can download a plug-in that allows you to upload photos directly from iPhoto.

12. Status Updates
Gone are the days of the ever-changing names and captions on your MySpace profile. As I mentioned in another post about Twitter, the status update is one of the cooler things about Facebook. Changing your status allows friends to know what you’re thinking at a particular time. For example, my status (updated 22 hours ago) is currently:

Seth is ready to have his damn car back. If only to go grocery shopping.

I’m sure there are many more, but I think that Facebook reigns supreme. I don’t care about updating MySpace anymore and I have a feeling that once more and more users migrate to Facebook, MySpace will deteriorate even more.

+ original post date: April 29, 2007 09:21 PM
+ categories: All About Seth, Family/Friends, Pop Culture, Web Stuff