Did Facebook Make MySpace Obsolete?

MySpace was founded in August 2003 and was acquired in July 2005 for $580 million by Fox Interactive Media of News Corporation. Headquartered in Beverly Hills California with Brad Greenspan overseeing Chris DeWolfe as CEO, Tom Anderson as starting president, Josh Berman and a talented team of programmers with many resources at their disposal, MySpace became the mecca for online social networking in the United States by June 2006.

In February 2004, Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook as a way for Harvard students to meet and network with other students. Flash forward to 2006, Zuckerberg allegedly turned down a second billion dollar offer from Yahoo to purchase Facebook. It was a choice rewarded in April 2008 as Facebook boasted a staggering 300 million world-wide users and snatched MySpace's coveted place of being the largest online social network.

Has Facebook become the new 'place for friends'? The quite dashing and new chief executive of MySpace, Owen Van Natta implies 'yes' in an October 2009 announcement but it all seems to be part of Van Natta's plan to take over the world...of online music and entertainment.

A glimpse at the MySpace Forums gives more than a slight impression what the majority of MySpace users are interested in. The Music Forum has the most topics with 734,488 threads and the most posts, 8,716,504. The MySpace Feedback Forum topics are the closest second at 609,001. Love and Relationships Forum, an 18 and up forum, has 7,383,009 posts. The Science, Travel and Business Forums hold the lowest counts of topic and posts, which may explain the possible exclusion of a weather and jobs section from MySpace.

As MySpace takes this expected and sturdy stride, including the recent acquisition of the online music-sharing service iLike, Facebook has tried to streamline and clarify its identity in August 2009 by purchasing and integrating the social aggregator, FriendFeed.

But the innovative notion that MySpace and Facebook are not competing in the same marketplace may not have entirely caught on to the masses yet. On November 3^rd an afternoon headcount of the icon Madonna's MySpace page shows 524,803 friends and grew by only 108 in twenty-four hours. On Facebook, Madonna's 1,262,806 fans grew by 669. Miley Cyrus's MySpace friends were 994,917 gaining 328 and on Facebook she gained 2,295 fans from 1,684,433 the day before.

The numbers hold true for the rapper 50 cent, with 1,590,081 Facebook fans and 1,199,685 friends on MySpace. The lovely Beyonce holds 2,587,420 fans on Facebook and 1,480,434 on MySpace. Even Lady Gaga with a mere 793,565 MySpace friends trumps them all with 4,253,870 fans on Facebook.

Amusingly enough, a look at approximately sixty responses to Tom Anderson's official Facebook page, Facebook has sixteen 'votes' and MySpace has thirteen. One person liked both social networking websites, over twenty-five folks were just saying hello to Anderson. One stand-out commenter liked MySpace more, but also eluded people don't talk on MySpace any longer.

Although it's hardly a fair comparison because of Anderson's long-term, near-celebrity status, there are a handful of MySpace accounts claiming to be Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, most sporting a just comment or two and usually only Anderson as a default friend.

Facebook has stolen the reins and made MySpace's own social networking obsolete but it did seem to fit snuggly into the business plans of both online communities' executives. And Facebook may keep hold of those reins for a long time unless MySpace realizes that socializing friends shouldn't become obsolete if the best advertisement is word of mouth and that as cool as it is to listen to your favorite band, it's so totally much cooler to listen to and talk about your favorite band with a friend.