Social Networking: MySpace vs. Facebook

Free for anyone to join, MySpace started out as a small network in the United States. Now several years later, MySpace has tightened web site security, and increased the features it offers to its members. After dealing with several law suits due to sexual predators, MySpace now allows profiles to be private (only viewable to those who are on your friends list) and allows a setting that requires either the person's last name or email address to be known before an invitation can be sent. Because of several phising scams, it also now alerts you if you are leaving the MySpace site, and helps fight SPAM by using captchas.

Beyond a personal profile, music artists, comedians, and filmakers can create a profile designed to target their audience and build a following for themselves.

Users can host up to 300 photos on their profiles and, with little or no HTML knowlege, can customize their profiles in an unimaginable number of ways to make their profiles just as unique as themselves.

MySpace now works with the government to release information on Amber Alerts and hurricane evacuations, along with prohibiting anyone on the sex offender registry from having an account.

All of these things, combined with the fact that they are now international and you can reach millions of people, make this a wonderful service.

Originally Facebook was only open to college students, though memebership was eventually opened to everyone when Facebook saw that MySpace was quickly ahead. There are many similarities between the two services, and many people use both. Some people however, prefer one or the other. Now, Facebook seems to have taken the cake for the perferred social network of choice.

Facebook has groups, applications, and many of the exact same features of MySpace, delivered in just about the same way. While there didn't used to be separate pages for artists, businesses, and the like, this feature has taken Facebook storm and has allowed many brands to extend to their audience. while profiles are customizable, the extent to which this can be done is much less than is the case with MySpace.

It is for this reason that Myspace receives an excellent rating in my book, and why Facebook only receives a good. There will be ones to disagree, of course, and I do use MySpace more than Facebook. When you consider the size of the network and the features, along with the fact that both are free, it does make it a hard choice!