Long before I worked for MySpace, I felt many of these things to be true. Thanks for posting Andrew.

The one thing I do miss is finding out about all the great new bands. As I start recording my own music, it seems a great opportunity to share your music with the world. Facebook has applications that can do this, but it is not nearly as direct. For this reason, I maybe making a new MySpace account in the near future.

Snobbery? Maybe. I interact with people from many demographics. However, most of my friends are from the same demographic as me because that is the area I was brought up in.

1. MySpace has been around & available much, much longer than Facebook. Of course it has 2.2x the users. To me, that’s not exactly a meaningful stat.

2. MySpace is open. Facebook is not. Of course it has more “unique visitors”. Unique visitors does not equal logins or social activity. Try searching for a band or common person on Google – chances are you’ll find a MySpace page within the first few results. Chances also are you’ll stay on the page a while.

3. This is very important – The fact that facebook is, as you say, “Googley”, works against its stats. Just think about how much more page views facebook would have if it made you go to a new page every time you wanted to comment, update a basic status, upload & comment on multiple photos, etc etc. On the whole, I’m willing to bet that MySpace users require 2 or 3 page “views” for most actions that Facebook handles on the same page view via an AJAX update.

4. Facebook has advertising models MySpace wish it could reproduce. Maybe MySpace does serve up more ads because of the extra page views (see #3) and extra ad space it garners. But does it have sponsored groups? Sponsored news feed listings? Targeted & consistent data/demographics that is worth more to advertisers? No, it doesn’t.

The list goes on and on… In the end, the point is this: Facebook has a quality product, a quality userbase, and completely unique advertising models. Whereas MySpace plays into the hands of outdated metric systems by using older technology & more traditional advertising routes. Of course if you put Facebook up head-to-head against MySpace, using outdated measurement models, MySpace will win. It’s like trying to measure the fuel economy of a hybrid car using a model that was intended for fuel-only cars. You get exaggerated & falsified results in one direction or another.

Additionally, from a business perspective, all the attention on Facebook is the best thing to happen to MySpace.

As a professional designer, I also have to say that I have seen really graphics-forward myspace pages, facebook is just better out of the box.

Oh, and its the music! Myspace has all the bands, why do you think I have myspace open right now on a tab I can’t see, I’m not updating my profile, I’m just listening.

http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/time-rich-or-time-poor/

Right on about the “creator-centric versus viewer-centric”