All I seem to hear about from friends about social networking sites is Facebook this and Facebook that - so started using it more and thought it would be good to contrast the two social networking giants here.
Okay, so the majority of this post will be all my own opinions (which will probably lean towards Myspace because it’s what I am used to and use more often), but it should be interesting to contrast some of the similar features of each site.
Photos
One great feature of social networking sites is the ability to share photos so I thought a good starting point would be to contrast the photo uploading process’.
Both sites have the same goal - uploading photos to an album and sharing that album with your friends - but there are differences in how both sites do this.
Myspace as most of you will know allows you to upload pictures into albums on your profile, allows you to upload multiple photos at once and has a pretty simple to use uploader to do so.
Well, Facebook is pretty much the same but they also allow you to just share a photo with your friends without putting it in your profile albums. Although you can only do this one photo at a time, it is a pretty nice little feature (I guess it’s instead of a bulletin on Myspace).
Applications
Applications are one of the main reasons I joined Facebook because at that point Myspace didn’t have them.
Now it seems that Myspace are catching up on this feature with loads of new applications added daily. Although facebook will probably have more altogether the majority of them are just pointless (in my experience).
Customizability
Is that even a word? Well, you know what I mean - the ability in which you can customize your profile and/or other parts of the site.
Myspace wins hands down on this one. Facebook doesn’t have much that you can customize (or it’s just hidden away and I haven’t found it yet), it’s all the same boring colour scheme and layout on every page. Okay so it makes it simpler for Facebook to do this, but for those of us who like to customize our pages (and by reading this blog I assume you are one of them) it is a real disappointment that we can’t on Facebook.
This is the main benefit of Myspace that I can see, it allows people to be much more creative and show off what they can do.
Overall
There are a bunch of other aspects I could go on about - groups, videos, music, etc. but most of it is pretty much the same on each site.
Overall I think Facebook is much simpler (and I can see why some people like that) and easier to use for the non-Internet savvy people out there (which in this generation isn’t a large amount of people). Myspace on the other hand is a bit harder to use (although they are trying to make it simpler while at the same time keeping the old ways for those who want to use them - e.g. profile 1.0 and profile 2.0) but I think you get more out of Myspace.
Someone once said to me that they thought Myspace was the better site with much more that you can customize but it’s harder to use than Facebook or other social networking sites like it. I absolutely agree with that person - Myspace is better, it just takes some know how to get the benefits out of it.
I guess it just depends on the type of person you are which one you will like more.
Which one do you like more?
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May 5th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
I used both and I used MySpace for at least 9 months before being introduced to Facebook.
I gave up MySpace.
Not because Facebook is ‘better.’ But the customization capabilities of MySpace began to just annoy me. While people CAN do more it doesn’t mean they SHOULD do more.
Who waits around for a messy MySpace page to load? Who wants to see all the flashy crap? Who wants music playing on top of videos on top of it all?
If you want a clean space to share and connect with friends then Facebook is great. If you’re into glitter and something a little splashier then MySpace is best.
Finally, it’s about finding friends. Demographically, it’s proven over and over again that Facebook users are on average more educated than MySpace users. I dunno why, but that’s what the numbers say. Frankly, I’ve found twice as many of my friends on Facebook so the move was good for me.