Space v face in an online social race

In a throwaway line in an interview the other day, Rupert Murdoch let slip a worry about MySpace, the online social networking site owned by his News Corp. Aren’t newspaper readers drifting off to MySpace? He was asked by the Wall Street Journal. “I wish they were. They ‘re all going to Facebook at the moment,” he replied.

Mr Murdoch was reflecting a common feeling in the febrile world of online social networking. Even a year ago, MySpace’s dizzying growth and popularity among young people had turned it into a social phenomenon. Business Week talked of the MySpace Generation – youngsters who exchanged messages, share photos and lived virtual lives on the site.

Now there is a new kid in town: Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old founder of Facebook. Some wrote him off as an arrogant, hubristic youth last year when he turned down Yahoo’s $1.6bn offer for his business. As Facebook has spread from college kids to adults and draws in media industry admirers, he now seems a very smart young man.

It is a mug’s game predicting which social networking service will endure and which will fade. For a time, Friendster was favourite, before it had technology problems and was overtaken by MySpace; Orkut, Google’s highly-rated venture, became a hit only in Brazil; social networking sites for people at work, such as LinkedIn and ZoomInfo, started slowly but are growing rapidly.

But the fight between MySpace and Facebook is intriguing because they are not only rivals but opposites. MySpace is messy and Facebook is clean; MySpace is a Los Angeles media company and Facebook is a Silicon Valley technology outfit; MySpace aims to entertain while Facebook dubs itself a “social utility”. This is a contest of philosophy as much as number of users.

So here is this mug’s prediction. Although MySpace has four times as many users as Facebook at the moment, I think Mr Murdoch is right to worry. As Google showed by beating Yahoo and others with a different kind of search engine, elegant technology that gives people something they need is a very powerful thing.

MySpace is a free-for-all. You can adopt whatever identity you want and be friends with anyone from people who you know to pop starts and even corporate brands. You can decorate your page in bright colours, flirt with and swear at people and generally mix it up. “We look upon MySpace as the Wild West,” says Travis Katz, head of its international business.

That appeals to many and particularly, I guess, to teenagers. Looking at the multi-coloured and flashing pages that many users build on MySpace gives me a headache, as does perusing some of their messages to each other. Nor, however, would I like to live I a purple-painted room and plenty of teenagers choose to do so when their parents allow them.

MySpace increasingly operates like a traditional media company, albeit a youth-oriented one. It tries to offer its 105m users as much entertainment as possible – including a lot of professional content. Users can post their own songs and watch their friends’ videos but they are also offered film clips from Hollywood and songs from well-know bands.

Facebook, by contrast, is a much quieter and more private affair. Launched at the same time as MySpace in 2004, it had different origins: it was built to allow students at Harvard University to interact with others. The site design is simple and restrained and it feels less like entering a big club than a room with only familiar faces in it.

On most social networking sites, users can see the majority of other peoples’ profiles but on Facebook that figure is under 1 per cent. It is less a community than a set of small communities that hardly overlap. “Facebook is a representation of people’s lives. This is your real name and these are your real friends,” says Matt Cohler, its head of strategy.

The other distinctive thing about Facebook is the degree to which it is technologically driven. An algorithm sifts through all the information about things that a user’s friends are doing – whether linking with others or adding applications to their pages – and serves up a sample of their going-on. It is subtly done, as if little social announcements are chattering over the wires.

Perhaps MySpace will evolve into a place for teenagers seeking entertainment while Facebook appeals to adults who have less time to mess about. The latter may well prefer a service that links them to friends and contacts with the minimum of fuss. One-quarter of Facebook users are already aged 24 or over and they also represent the fastest growing segment.

The sites could complement each other, with people turning from MySpace to Facebook as they grow older. Or they could coexist, being used at different times by the same people, depending on what they want.

But I wonder if that is how people will behave. In practice, it requires a big investment of time and effort to keep up with such sites and people will probably choose one over another in the end. Given that, Facebook’s emphasis on utility rather than entertainment is smarter in the long term. It is nice to be entertained but it is more of a wrench to abandon something useful.

Social networking sites flourish when users have a good reason to stick around – and wither when their attention wanes. So Mr Murdoch should worry about loss of momentum at MySpace. Silicon Valley is full of young men who believe they know better than others. Mr Zuckerberg, however, could be right.

Written by John Gapper, john.gapper@ft.com, for the Financial Times, published on Monday June 18, 2007.

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