Myspace Vs Facebook Rant

Indisputably the two biggest social networking sites are Myspace and Facebook though there are hundreds of others out there. Myspace was the first to hit us with the freedom to collect friends and customise our pages in horrible ways and now Facebook has graced us with its rigid structured approach to fun.

Could this freedom exposed in Myspace be its biggest downfall? I'm going to look at some of the features of Myspace that have ended up frustrating users and where Facebooks approach has countered this.

1. Music - This has to be the single most annoying feature of Myspace. The net has opened up music in a whole new way that wasn't available before and though the music companies are only just catching on sites such as Myspace have helped pioneered ways for new DJ's, artists and bands to grow an audience.No one loves all music, in fact most people would agree that 99% of music is crap.My 99% of crap music will be different to your 99% of crap music which is where the problem is.Myspace allows people to put their choice of music on their page then annoyingly plays that track every time someone views it! If your like me and have iTunes playing music when your on-line the last thing you want is some annoying emo band's song starting to play about how they want to kill themselves when the only thing you really want to do is leech some more friends off them or view some pissed up photos.Facebook on the other hand doesn't have the facility to add music.

   An iTunes plug-in that shows your current track would be nice but it certainly doesn't need to play it!

2. Customisable themes - Myspace gives users a lot of control when it comes to changing the layout of pages, I'm sure they did this in good will and I'm sure they never expected some of the monstrosities that have been created as a result. Allowing non design minded individuals to add animated gifs, brightly coloured backgrounds and rearrange content to make almost unnavigable websites seems insane!According to Alexa traffic rankings Myspace is the 5th most popular site worldwide (7th in the UK), meaning that one of the biggest sites on-line adears to hardly any web or accessibility standards. Facebook may look more boring but at least the navigation is consistent and easy to use.
3. Adverts - In general I don't have a problem with adverts, there are in many cases a great way to provide a service for free, ImAFish certainly wouldn't be around without help from our sponsors. While Myspace does not over do it with the advertising it is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and its primary goal it to make money for its shareholders. I find it interesting that many of the people on Myspace are against globalisation and capitalism yet they use one of the biggest tools out there to help News corp please its shareholders.Though I'm sure its only a matter of time before Facebook is brought by either Yahoo or Google and the site has already had fears of data mining similar to Myspace. Facebook has also been used in the U.S. by Universities to pin-point illegal parties however this is not such a problem in the UK as the legal age for drinking is 18 and not 21.

Facebook is far from perfect and has some pretty big internationalization issues (why are there only American school options when picking how you met a friend - what the hell is grad school and why is University not on the list?).

It will be interesting to see if these issues keep people on either Myspace or Facebook and what the future holds for these social networking sites as people get bored.