Facebook Takes Fight to MySpace

MySpace succeeded in part because of its early decision to offer members as many features as it could think of: photos, blogs, music, and add-on "widgets." It worked because people liked the freedom to experiment with how they'd express who they are online. But it only worked for so long.

Most MySpace users customized their page -- and customized it and customized it, until it looked like some sort of monstrous crazy quilt whose chaotic garishness drove away everyone except the spammers, trolls and people so desperate to make friends on MySpace that they would build their profiles on wholesale lies.

Compete.com, a research firm tracking online activity, noted recently that Facebook's growth has started to pick up while MySpace's has slowed. Compete looked at what it calls attention -- time users spent on a site as a percentage of all their online time -- and found that it grew 23% in April for Facebook, vs. 1% for MySpace.

Anecdotal evidence backs up those numbers. Writing about a recently gathered panel of high school students from Silicon Valley, GigaOm writer Liz Gannes noted they had a strong preference for Facebook as their social network of choice. In the comments of her post, someone who described himself as a high school junior in said this:

"The fact that MySpace is so open in what people can put in their profile means that some profiles are loaded with bandwidth-sucking content -- content that is poorly laid out and often useless. Facebook is clean, streamlined, easy to use, ad-free and always running. ... MySpace was a good 'gateway drug' to social sites, but Facebook is the drug of choice."