Microsoft is contemplating an investment in the popular social networking site Facebook (ranked #2 behind MySpace). The news, according to the Wall Street Journal, stirs up a possible bidding battle as Google throws its hat into the “also interested” ring. As interesting as the fuss may be, it’s still not known if Facebook would even welcome the notion.
Facebook’s 23-year-old co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg rejected a $1 billion buyout offer from Yahoo! in 2006, and now that the company is valued at more than $10 billion, it seems a smart move. Still, I’m not buying the $10 billion valuation. What’s the big deal about Facebook, anyway?
Once available only to college students, Facebook gained popularity against MySpace after letting non-collegiate consumers into its network. Mashable does a great job comparing the two companies’ products, but I still think that it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. While Facebook wins out with a clean layout, organized media sharing platform, and community group building, MySpace trumps Facebook in the areas of self-promotion and new music exposure. Unfortunately, those are the areas that fuel the viral offering of the MySpace product.
As a music enthusiast and avid participant in art events in my city, one visit to my MySpace account — ha ha, I’m set to “private” — yields all the events listings and announcements in my area. By linking with all the musicians, artists, and people that share my interests, I only receive alerts to the genres and art subjects that are important to me.
MySpace’s blog product feeds me editorial content for everything from my friend’s new baby adventures to updates from the programmer of my favorite music editing software. Since Facebook only lets me connect to individual people, I am not likely going to drop my MySpace account any time soon.
The rapid networking of MySpace users is mostly due to the availability of 3rd-party friend-adding and auto-commenting software. While it is these types of tools that allow spammers into the network, it is these same tools that also cause the wide-spread promotion of “good” content throughout the community. Rather than killing off the friend-adders, MySpace may find a great product add-on by hard-coding the tool into its interface and offering it to bands and media outlets for a fee. At least then, content continues to move across boundaries without spammers in the mix.
It’s not that people just want to connect, or that people want content. Social networking allows users to connect through content. I suspect that it will be the site that harnesses this concept that will win out in the end.
Comments
Fred333 Says:
October 2nd, 2007 at 12:35 pm
Very good article. I think that connecting through content is the key because it brings that added value to the relationship.
Daysha Taylor Says:
October 3rd, 2007 at 1:09 pm
I don’t even know if MySpace realizes what it has. While users will grunt at the 3rd party adding software, they don’t realize that half of the new media that they have discovered is because artists are using the tools. A user just sees a few pieces of spam and blames the bots. MySpace should have pick up on the fact that the 3rd party auto-adders are allowing an organic form of content sharing to emerge.
A good example: If it wasn’t for the auto-friend request, I would have never be introduced to this page: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=39302275
As dorky as it may be, I enjoyed reading about the original actor that played Michael Myers in the movie Halloween. (I can’t read annual reports all the time!) And, from Tony Moran’s page, I learned that there was something called “Fear Fest” happening nearby in March, so spend another 10 minutes reading about that (as well as requesting a friend link so I’ll get a reminder when festival time approaches).
I’m just not seeing this happen with Facebook, or other social networking sites that I have played around with.
Microsoft and Google may face off for Facebook | Myspace World Says:
October 4th, 2007 at 1:53 am
[...] Original post by Daysha Taylor [...]
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