MySpace/Facebook Face-off

MySpace or Facebook? It's one of those questions that endures, like "paper or plastic." There are interesting socioeconomic issues involved (danah boyd explores these in her essay "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace," which, interestingly, isn't written in all lowercase letters as one might assume from her idiosyncratic non-capitalization of her name), especially among younger internet users. As a thirtysomething guy who uses these sites alternately as a communication medium and procrastination technique, I'm more concerned with functionality, design, and whether or not a given social networking site is making the world a worse place (hint: in the case of both these sites, the ultimate answer is "yes;" check out tribe.net for evil-free social networking). I've been on MySpace for almost three years now, and Facebook for long enough to get a feel for the place, so here are my first impressions regarding how the two match up.

-----

OVERALL LOOK AND FEEL:
 
MYSPACE:  The site has a notoriously shitty infrastructure.  It's slower than Mike Huckabee's reasoning process and goes down more often than Larry Craig at a public lavatory manufacturer's convention.  And I like the whole Web 2.0 aesthetic, which MySpace lacks.

FACEBOOK:   Has the whole Web 2.0 aesthetic.  It looks great and always runs.  Shiny!  ADVANTAGE: FACEBOOK
 
-----
 
PROFILES:
 
MYSPACE:  MySpace's decision to let end users fool around with CSS on profiles should be prosecuted as aggressively as a war crime.  I mean, to each their own: you may like a browser-crashing spectacle of a page with a Blink-182 jpg. background, the Comic Sans font, three songs blaring simultaneously and so forth, but the rest of us hate you for it.  Seriously, I've asked around.  I have seen maybe three customized MySpace pages that looked somewhat clean, and even then the effect is somewhat assy because of garish banner ads.  Tom needs to stand trial in the Hague for this.
 
FACEBOOK:  The pages are super-clean and look great.  Only problem: the widget-y "applications" one can add to their profile.  My God, the applications.  Too many, and no can find anything on your page.  They are really addictive to add, too; Nani wrote to me, "You've only been here for a week, and you have more applications than me.  Should I be worried?" Yeah, Nani, probably.  The effect of the widgets on a profile's layout is annoying, but not as bad as a "Jamie Lynn Spears's Fetus"-themed Myspace page.  ADVANTAGE: FACEBOOK, despite the fact that the "Super Wall" is super-lame.
 
-----
 
BULLETINS:

FACEBOOK:  You can see you friend's updates (called "stories;" more about this in the bit on Terms of Service below) on your own page.  This is useful if you need to know that "Unnamed Person just burnt her nipple on a hot pie pan" or "Other Unnamed Person is going to attack, with a hammer, the next person who spams her with Super Wall" (which is a totally defensible action).  Otherwise, it's a little unnerving and kinda useless.

MYSPACE:  The whole bulletin deal can be annoying... witness the people who use them as defacto blog posts to tell me about the cheese sandwich they just ate (folks who do that repeatedly get summarily axed from my friends list), or the former student who was sending out Ron Paul spam (for reals, if that dude is your candidate, don't talk to me for a while).  But all in all, it's fairly useful in terms of knowing about band shows and album releases, as well as finding out what my favorite Hollywood club's Friday night theme will be so I can be appropriately fabulous.  ADVANTAGE: MYSPACE

-----

RELATIONSHIPS:

MYSPACE:  Only has the categories "Single," "Divorced," "In A Relationship," "Married" and "Swinger."  And you have to choose one.  In a way, this is good... some douchebag therefore can't conveniently leave it unfilled, do the player thing, and then use the plausible deniability BS on aggrieved parties by saying, "Hey... my profile never said I was single, did it?"  But it is limiting, in ways that may seem strange to those of you who live in places other than free-wheelin' California.  And that's all I have to say on the matter.

FACEBOOK:  More categories, and you can leave it off altogether.  This can be, and no doubt has been, abused.  But the categories themselves are pretty good... you can put, for instance, "It's Complicated" as your status, which some people seem to find effective.  ADVANTAGE: NEITHER (MySpace wins on ethics, Facebook on adaptability.)

-----
 
THE REPUBLICAN CONNECTION:
 
FACEBOOK:  OK, we may be getting into tinfoil hat territory here... but this site has put together the connection between Facebook's venture capital, the CIA and DARPA (that link may also put some of you off Facebook for good).  If Facebook is a data-mining effort on behalf of the US government (and I'm not totally convinced this is the case), it is as brilliant as it is insidious and evil.
 
MYSPACE:  After that, media bastard Rupert Murdoch's 2005 purchase of MySpace seems perfectly benign.  ADVANTAGE: MYSPACE
 
-----
 
MUSIC:
 
MYSPACE:  This is the best reason to use MySpace.  Any band worth knowing has a page with tour info and audio.  There are a lot of bands not worth knowing, and they've all tried to spam me at one time or another, but overall this is a great feature.
 
FACEBOOK:  They're just starting a music feature, and the band they've chosen to highlight in promoting the feature is the motherhumping Dave Matthews Band, which I quite dislike (apologies to Nani and Summer).  ADVANTAGE: MYSPACE times one thousand.
 
-----
 
TERMS OF SERVICE:
 
MYSPACE:  Crappy.
 
FACEBOOK:  Shitty.  For instance, they claim the exclusive right to "create derivative works" from facebook activity.  Might this be why updates are called "stories?" ADVANTAGE: PEOPLE WHO GO OUTSIDE ONCE IN A WHILE

-----

So there you have it. Facebook is pretty (and great for networking), and the Super Poke application is hella fun. MySpace has good support for musicians and has become the point of contact for a frillion bands. And they both totally suck to a pretty much equal extent. I'd say "fuck them both," but I need to log in to see if anyone has posted on my "wall."

I'm on Facebook now. If you want to add me and don't know my real name, ask and ye shall receive.

I have a couple of real blog posts in me, and they'll probably go up in the next week or so. At the moment I'm suffering through holiday concerts and the like.