Why Facebook is better than MySpace

Considering that Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought MySpace for $580m (£315m) [1], he is probably not very happy with the opinions that I am about to convey. But in all honesty I doubt that I am alone on this topic.

The fact of the matter is that MySpace and Facebook are both social networking sites, although MySpace has a distinct edge over Facebook in that it has a bias towards the music industry. Various record labels and artists have their own profiles, using it to display their material and communicate with fans. In contrast, Facebook is entirely on a personal basis and leans towards photo-sharing.

I've got no problem with the MySpace focus on music: in fact, that's actually all I use it for and I think it is a fantastic idea. Now fans can stay much more up to date with their favourite artists and discover all sorts of new music all over the world incredibly easily. MySpace in that regard is quite possibly one of the best things since sliced bread.

My gripe with MySpace is that the actual website is absolute rubbish. It is slow, messy, poorly designed and the search function is terrible. As an example of poor design, when a song is running on the profile of an artist, in order to add the artist as a friend, or view their photos, the music stops. Now this is not a big deal when using it occasionally, but for people like myself who use the site to trawl through new bands to find new material, it really becomes a big deal pretty quickly.

The site is so visually noisy as well, in contrast to the clean lines of Facebook. This is, in all fairness, largely down due to the fact that the user can actually edit the code dictating the appearance of their profile using html code itself. Also the site is a lot more advertisement-intensive, no doubt due to the rule of the News Corp. For comparison, Facebook only contains at most two advertisements per page, a side banner and a discrete banner at the foot of the page.

Facebook is constantly being updated and developed by Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of his team, whereas the legendary "Tom" and co. of MySpace seem to change very little at all. In fact in the 10 months or so that I have been a member, the only significant change being a little button to flag up a friend request as spam; whereas during the same period Facebook has been through a major aesthetic revamp and more recently witnessed the addition of Facebook Applications. This allows users to add applications to their profile from independent sources in a way that it is "turning Facebook itself into a kind of operating system for internet users" [2].

Overall I am a fan of the service provided by MySpace, but I wish the developers would get their fingers out and make sure they do it in a better way! I think it's time for Murdoch to get the chequebook out and bring in the coding cavalry. Before they start losing even market share than they are now.

Sources:
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5101942.stm
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6907895.stm