As for the ‘self-indulgent’ profiles of Myspace– well, I don’t like glitter graphic clogged profiles either, but I like to design mine– it’s fun, something I don’t get from Facebook. Perhaps in the future Myspace could add a feature where one could turn ‘off’ seeing graphics and code in other profiles as one browses the site, just see the default Myspace profile and text instead; might be a popular option for people out there who are still on dialup.

It’s not Coke vs. Pepsi…..it’s Coke vs. R.C. Cola.

Personally, I use both on a daily basis. I now spend less time on Facebook because if any one of my friends updates their page, I see it on my own homepage. While on MySpace, I have to sort through my friends in order to see if anything new is up with them.

I like that Facebook has the AJAX and other nifty features, but I don’t like how exclusive it can be.

As for the pageviews issue, Myspace recently made an intuitive and very much needed change that may cut down on pageviews– it put a ‘comment back’ link on the bottom of each comment, so that the user can click and then write the comment, instead of clicking on the new comments indicator, then click on the users profile, then clicking add comment, then submit comment, etc. Another recent change was unlimited pictures and the capability to upload picture albums (probably a cue from Facebook). They are slowly but surely making changes, though to be honest– I wish they’d work on being more stable. There’s a lot that Myspace could improve on, especially the way they accept CSS in profiles, as well as the design– but it IS working on it, so don’t underestimate it.

It’s not all ‘kids’ that are on Myspace either, most of my friends there are 25-40 years old.

Social networks do seem to come in cycles, but there is a certain staying power among the ‘big boys.’ Friendster and Hi-5 still maintain a healthy hold. Users are not strict in their use of these sites, and they tend to follow the crowd.

Both sites have their niche – Facebook the college crowd and MySpace the music crowd. To assume that MySpace would stumble any time soon is probably a bit ignorant. It’s a huge beast, and difficult to manoever, but they have the established users and target market that they can continue to exploit. Re-developing the site needs to be a priority, but it must be completed with alienating these users, disrupting the service they expect, and detrimenting what is established by the site/for the site.

The final point I’ll make is the popularity of these sites on a world scale. It is of course important to tap into the North American market, but having a global reach gives you the potential of a much larger audience. Orkut has a strong following in Brazil, while Bebo was huge in the UK. Facebook is very American, established by an American student and pushed to American students. Will the rest of the world be as quick to adopt it?

For all of us that don’t know how to spend our time, I guess we can continue to follow the two sites. :)

The reason I signed up in the first place was because I hated MySpace. I thought the custom profiles were tacky… and now FaceBook is following suit.

I’m not going to unregister from the service, but I no longer log on unless I’m trying to contact someone.

My two cents.