Facebook Vs. Myspace
Social networking websites have dominated internet culture and communication since the debut of MySpace in 2003, and now with the growing popularity of Facebook, some find themselves stuck between the two platforms.
The key to knowing the difference between Facebook and MySpace is being fully aware of the fact that they are two totally different ways of achieving the same purpose, which is to keep you in contact with your family, friends and co-workers in a cool and interactive way.
MySpace is preferred by many due to its many customizable aesthetic features (including a profile song or song playlist that comes on when friends visit your page), and the ability to post lengthy “Bulletins” to all of your friends at once— both aspects that Facebook lacks entirely. While some over-do it with page customization, making profiles slow to load, most find that customization, in moderation, makes for a more individual and interesting social networking experience.
Additionally, the freely customizable HTML allows you to hide any section you don’t want your friends viewing, which includes your blog, your general info section (with subsections for your favorite music, television and movies, and even your heroes), and, popularly, the comments. This is a favorite choice to make hidden because of the possibly private nature of discussions conducted in comments.
Facebook, on the other hand, is noted for its clean and uncluttered layout; each profile page looks exactly the same for different applications and friends listed on the sidebar.
The site, which originated as a site mainly aimed towards college students, boasts the ability to post Twitter-like status messages that appear on both you and your friends’ “newsfeeds”, indicating what you’re thinking, feeling and/or doing at any given time. Users may take full advantage of this feature to talk about themselves, seeing as the Facebook “About Me” section is limited to a tiny space and amount of characters—as opposed to MySpace, where you can write a biography of encyclopedic length on your profile page and still have plenty of space to go.
It’s plain to see within a short time of using Facebook that its main purpose is to communicate—and it definitely achieves that, if a bit intensely. The default settings allow you to see whenever your friends add another friend, get a new “wall post” or photo comment, achieve a high score in a Facebook game application, and more. If you don’t wish to receive this information or send it to your friends you can simply disable the feature.
However, even with those features hidden, the openness of Facebook is unavoidable—with the friend newsfeed displayed on your homepage, your friends can comment on or “Like” (a functionality allowing your friends to “approve” of whatever you’ve just posted) virtually any activity you take part in.
In closing, you might choose Facebook if you want a straight-forward social networking site with its share of fun and games minus the clutter, and can sacrifice a bit of privacy to communicate with your friends in a ton of different ways. Or you can choose MySpace if you want to be able to completely express yourself and your personality via your profile page and still be able to keep in touch in an efficient and fun way.
Article by Marnie
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