How Facebook beats MySpace

With news that Facebook has for the first time overtaken MySpace in users and that MySpace has responded by sacking nearly a third of its workforce, people are asking the obvious question: Since these sites serve approximately the same purpose – facilitating social networking among online-friend networks – what is MySpace doing wrong? Or, more accurately, what is Facebook doing right?

The answer is simple: Contrary to popular opinion, people aren't attracted to dazzling new technologies. They're attracted to dazzling new technologies that support the practices they're already engaged in. Facebook knows how to offer an unobtrusive tool and then get out of the way. MySpace, by emphasising the features of the site itself, misses this point entirely.

Though online social networking tools are new, the practice of social networking is as old as neighbourhoods.

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While both Facebook and MySpace, the world's most popular social networking sites, support the human social tendency, they have done so by paths that have attracted very different audiences. Their slogans make the difference in approach clear. Facebook's promise is that it "helps you connect and share with the people in your life". The point here is that you already have a social network. Facebook exists only to support communication with the people in it. Compare this to the MySpace slogan: "A place for friends". The difference is subtle but significant. While Facebook is a tool intended to support communication and networking, MySpace is a thing, a place, a new hangout site – a kind of virtual alternative to the mall beloved by teenagers.