Gosh, I don’t know how long it has been, but a couple years ago, I set myself up with a page on Myspace. It was the social networking site for adults. Facebook was out there, but required a *.edu e-mail address to access it. I had an alumni account at JMU, but had long since forgotten the credentials and the geniuses running the systems down there have yet to come up with a half-decent (I can call them) recovery tool. Myspace it was…

I liked Myspace. I loved how you could easily embed music in your page, I loved how you could modify the cascading style sheet of your page, and I loved how easily I could stay in touch with my friends. After a while, however, this all began to get abused. Children got on the site (resulting in predators), teenage girls (and even some of my friends) began using Myspace layout editors without knowing a thing about design or code and rendered their sites completely unreadable or usable, and people began embedding not only that nifty music player, but fifty thousand videos and anything else that might be embeddable, resulting in page loads that took a ridiculous amount of time, bandwidth, and patience to disable everything that was set to autoplay.

I don’t have an exact date, but sometime in late ’06, Facebook opened its doors to the public. Having already spent a good amount of time on my layout and having ~200 friends on Myspace, I was of course a late adopter. It wasn’t until Myspace drove me completely bonkers and more than half the time when I was asked if I was on a social-networking site it was “Are you on Facebook?” that I decided to take a look. What I found was a rather bland looking site, with no major layout changes permitted by the user, but at the same time, it felt much more adult and clean and their Application technology was very cool.

Some time in late ’07, when I realized people that were new to the social-networking scence no longer created Myspace pages at all, I made the jump. It has now been a few months and I have found that I am only visiting Myspace every other week or so to find nothing new. As such, today is the day I am closing my account. One less site for me to peruse is  good thing. Goodbye, Myspace.

Some quick notes on the differences of the sites:

 Category  Winner Explanation
 Founder Myspace I’m sorry, Mark, but your whole “I’m not pretentious and that makes me cool” strikes me as a farce; it only makes you more pretentious. Tom, you seem like someone I wouldn’t mind having a beer with.
 Customization Facebook While Myspace is more customizable, it is only with code, which results in a lot of awful things created by people who do not know what they’re doing. Facebook is more bland looking, but it is tidy, and their Applications concept is just plain cool.
 Worth Facebook I’d actually call this a tie if I didn’t look at the future of the two sites. Thanks to a recent Microsoft purchase of a stake in Facebook, a calculator would tell you it is worth $15 billion, but number is bogus. It may be so in the future, and that will make it a good investment, but they aren’t there now. On the other side, Rupert Murdoch believes Myspace to be worth $6 billion; a reasonable number and one that I think both sites likely hover around. Heck, even if the number is wrong, I believe both sites hover around the same value.
Technology Facebook They never go down, their Applications application is money, they were by far first to market with photo tagging, and the site itself is coded much better. Myspace is playing catch-up, but it is too little, too late.
Overall Facebook This is what this blog post is all about. Simply put, I will not have a Myspace page at the end of the day.

Farewell, Myspace.

To note, Facebook did scare me as well as a few others a bit with their Beacon service, and their founder’s reaction was subpar, but I have faith in them. If this is the biggest hurdle they ever have to leap, they’re in good shape. I have heard from a few friends that they will never use Facebook because of security concerns, but I think their concerns are just as valid over on Myspace. Heck, what kind of information could anyone possibly get anyway? If you don’t want to share something, don’t. I understand that that was the precise problem with Beacon, but it has been remedied; get over it.