MySpace

This time, the stats are form Nielsen Online. According to iMedia Connection and Fortune’s Bit Tech blog, Neilsen reports that LinkedIn is the fastest growing of the three social networks, although MySpace is still by far the biggest (and Facebook is the most swanky).

I ganked some of the data from Fortune, although there’s more data on their site about blog services:

Although, like a lot of other people, I’m starting to notice “social graphs” in all sorts of other places online, like AIM and E-mail. Of course those are networks - I’m connected to hundreds and hundreds of people through e-mail threads and Skype conversations. Why don’t we map those out?

Fred Wilson did some extremely rough guessing and came up with statistics for “networks” like Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, which incidentally cream anything you see above:

Our buddy (and keynote speaker) Jeremiah Owyang is in Barcelona at the Forrester Consumer Forum, where he got to chat with Jay Stevens, VP of Operations for Myspace, and then shared “a few nuggets” from his presentation, most notably:

[Jay Stevens: “User told us that ‘I don’t want brands to advertise to me, I want them to be my friend”]

This is also the core concept behind Facebook’s new “advertising” efforts. Companies have pages that a user can befriend. It seems like MySpace is now (and maybe has been already, I don’t know), advocating for businesses to create profiles in MySpace and just become friends with users. Jay offers an example:

So how do you take advantage of these social networks? Build a network within a network. Create icons (content, images, logos) that will be dressing up users profiles. A few don’t matter as much, until thousands and then millions do this. An English tea brand called has 9500 friends in MySpace, they encouraged users to change their profile pictures to become a cute monkey icon.

Sounds like good advice that applies to all social networks.

Apparently, according to those with a sneak peak at this week’s ComScore numbers, Facebook has yet to fully recover from the September traffic dip (i.e. get back to August numbers), but MySpace is roaring ahead with record highs in unique visitor counts:

Facebook bounced back from the seasonal downturn in September, showing 7.5% month-over-month growth with 32.9 unique visitors for the month. Meanwhile, MySpace hit a new all-time high with 71.9 million unique visitors in October. While the site also had a seasonal dip in September, unlike Facebook the total was up from August, when the company had a reported 68.4 million uniques.

I need to avoid the trap of calling MySpace out of the fight just because I don’t like it. As much as I might close my eyes and twirl my hands, mine is not the only opinion that matters.

Facebook just dropped some news onto their what’s new page: you can now set any picture you are tagged in to be your profile picture just by clicking a link below the picture, and more interestingly, they are calling on bands to create pages for themselves.

This is definitely MySpace territory. Remember when Rupert Murdoch said he wasn’t worried about Facebook? He should start thinking about it.

Rumors of Facebook Music as reported by TechCrunch don’t seem to have been too far off base. In the flurry of excitement about being able to create pages for companies, it seems to have escaped everyone’s attention that you can also create pages—wait, you’re encouraged to create pages—for bands.

The killer part of this is that Facebook doesn’t even need to expand page functionality to support the specialized needs of bands, the developer community can provide that service themselves by creating apps, and in many cases, will probably profit from it. Once again, everybody wins but Myspace.

Amusing quote of the day comes from Rupert Murdoch, the infamous man at the helm of News Corp (and therefore Myspace):

He added that arch rival Facebook was not “cannibalising” MySpace’s audience and there was plenty of room in the market for other platforms.

“MySpace is a place for self-expression,” he said.

“Facebook on the other hand tends to be a web utility, similar to a phonebook.”

I think he is right that Myspace and Facebook serve slightly different purposes on the internet. But I get the distinct sense that Facebook is gunning for more MySpace users. If I were MySpace, I’d be concerned.

Both of the Social Network behemoth’s made advertising announcements today, and from what I can tell, they went in completely different directions. I can’t do a whole lot better than point you first to the TechCrunch liveblogging of the Facebook announcement, and second to Jeremiah’s breakdown of the two new services.

OK, so now you’re caught up.

Based only on those two posts (since that’s currently all I know about these new ad systems), I’d say Facebook has a better concept going forward. It sounds somewhat like a large-scale affiliate program with a set of Groucho glasses on, which is not really a bad way to go.

Facebook has been right to try to identify what can drive sales inside a social network, and look to leverage that rather than to just increase the real estate given to “traditional” ads.

I’m also skeptical of the business profile pages. I don’t think they’re going to be a big hit. It’s good that businesses will finally have a real home on Facebook, but I’m not sure that it brings a lot of value to the network, or for that matter, more value to the business than having your employees on as individual people.

Mashable is reporting that Silicon Alley is reporting that MySpace may become a part of Google’s newly announced Open Social series of APIs.

Open Social is a direct response to the common sentiment that everyone in the socnet space must huddle together to stave off eventual defeat by the space’s newest 800 lb gorilla. If MySpace joins the huddle, the balance of power may shift once again.

The question now is, will our friends in Palo Alto come out to play?

Update: This rumor has now been confirmed.

The slightly over the hill online social networking behemoth MySpace has announced a partnership with Zazzle that will allow users to sell custom tee-shirts via their profiles

This makes perfect sense. Merchandise is a great way for artists to make extra cash, and the one place where Facebook still has nothing on MySpace is in the world of music self-promotion.

Because while some pioneering artists have ventured into Facebook territory — Brandi Carlile was my friend, until she removed her profile — the fact that a user can have only 5,000 friends is a real turn-off for artists whose MySpace fans number in the tens or even hundreds of thousands.

Of course, Facebook never intended entertainment world self-promoters to make use of their site the way they make use of MySpace. If Tila Tequila had tried to build her following on Facebook, we sure as hell wouldn’t be watching her sleeping in a bed with 16 lesbians and 16 straight guys on MTV right now.

Facebook created a walled-garden environment where friendships were supposed to resemble — if not exactly replicate — a user’s real-world connections. Since I’m not bosom friends with Christina Aguilera in real life (I wish!) her being my friend on Facebook wouldn’t make much sense in Mark Zuckerberg’s world. But in Tom Anderson’s corner of the Web, I can be her buddy, along with 470,902 other people.

A lot of people think that this means Facebook has no designs on MySpace’s last bastion of dominance, but I see it differently. Zuckerberg has always wanted Facebook relationships to resemble real-world relationships, but that’s not how people are using it. Facebook will have to adapt to actual user behavior or die a slow death.

Since they like to keep things neatly controlled and categorized, I would guess that their long-term strategy for creeping into the music world space is going to resemble their moves in the politics arena.

My prediction: they’ll eventually launch an affordable freemium service that will allow the Tila Tequilas (and Robert Scobles!) of the world to have unlimited friends, special profiles, and access to premium content-sharing applications that will allow users to embed and spread their blog posts, songs and video content far and wide.

It’s just another sensible way to monetize a site whose current valuation is way out of step with profits.

MySpace has launched an offering for advertisers that targets their content to users based on their profiles. The Wall Street Journal seems to think that this means that MySpace is losing ground. Fox Interactive’s Chief Revenue Officer Michael Barret fired back:

I don’t agree with the statement that Facebook is growing at the expense of MySpace. There is nothing that shows that. Our growth has plateaued, but it would be pretty hard to get any more penetration than what we do in the U.S. … You are starting to see a world in which people can have multiple profiles and multiple networks. … What does MySpace do for them that a Facebook wouldn’t? It seems that they are watching a lot more videos on MySpace. They are listening to a lot more music. Meeting new people. … Now that [social networking] is so mainstream, I don’t think anybody is going to have a monopoly on social networking.

What’s clear is that as Facebook becomes more mainstream, it’s hitting some of the same snags that have plagued MySpace. Problems with sexual predators and privacy concerns are popping up out of the woodwork. Our speaker Nick O’Neill writes:

The entire site has been completely open for Facebook employees since the beginning. A comparison of the privacy policies of Facebook, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft proves that Facebook does absolutely nothing to restrict internal employee access of information while each of the competitors restrict employee access to personal information unless it is critical for their job. This could result in a massive security leak at Facebook. I’ve had AOL employees tell me of their lack of access to user data and analytics of anything outside of their department.

I cannot start to explain how bad of a business practice this is. Facebook is going to be in some serious trouble as they rush to build an internal system for restricting access to information.

Is this the tallest poppy syndrome or what? Facebook isn’t the hot new thing anymore. It’s officially gone mainstream and it is now suffering the slings and arrows that come with that designation. That includes the obligation to restrict employee access to user data and to protect minors from sexual predators.

I remember when Facebook was considered a safe environment for students to share personal information. But now the same problems that have plagued MySpace are cropping up on Facebook. The New York Times reports that New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s office is investigating sexual predators on Facebook:

But about a week after an investigator from Mr. Cuomo’s office set up a profile for a fictitious 14-year-old girl on Aug. 30, a 24-year-old man sent a message through Facebook asking her for “nude pics,” Mr. Cuomo said.

The investigator, also posing as the fictitious girl’s mother, sent an e-mail message to Facebook complaining about the man’s request. Facebook responded that it would review the message and remove any posts that violated its rules. But in his letter, Mr. Cuomo said that Facebook had taken no action as of yesterday, and that the 24-year-old man’s profile was still on the site.

One key difference between Facebook and MySpace anyone who wants a extra layer of protection can remove their names, profile pictures and other information from search results. Sexual predators can’t prey on people they can’t find. That was never an option on MySpace.

I don’t mean to insinuate that technology is a full solution to a serious problem, but I don’t think that Facebook’s problem will ever become as entrenched as MySpace.

Chuck Lam is at it again. He’s the guy that did that cool analysis of Facebook penetration and school prestige in Bay Area high schools. (I had a lot of fun replicating his results.) This time, he’s worked up a metric called “MySpace intensity” and is correlating it to the same metric of high school prestige used last time: GreatSchools.net ratings.

He arrived at this metric by dividing the number of MySpace profiles that claim a particular high school by the total number of students currently in that school according to GreatSchools.net. Since MySpace doesn’t make distinctions between current students and alumni, and since MySpace users have less of an incentive to list their high schools — MySpace has no networks — this metric is fuzzier than the Facebook penetration data he found.

Chuck’s data and my analysis, plus an analysis of Seattle-area schools after the jump. [click to continue...]

Social networking ethnologist Danah Boyd made waves in the social media community a few months ago with her observation that the division between Facebook and Myspace is largely socioeconomic:

Hegemonic American teens (i.e. middle/upper class, college bound teens from upwards mobile or well off families) are all on or switching to Facebook. Marginalized teens, teens from poorer or less educated backgrounds, subculturally-identified teens, and other non-hegemonic teens continue to be drawn to MySpace.

A few days ago, Chuck Lam of Data Strategy looked at schools in the San Francisco Bay area to see if Facebook penetration correlated at all with the independent ratings of local high schools by GreatSchools.net. His data set after the jump: [click to continue...]

One of our commenters — Derek Scruggs from Enthusiast Group — sent me a preview version of his company’s white paper yesterday. It’s a pretty neat piece of work with a lot of interesting case studies and some excellent tips. Here are some points of interest that stood out to me as I read through: [click to continue...]

Also in that article I mentioned earlier, there’s a brief paragraph of the openness of Facebook as a platform, which is what enables all of these applications in the first place.

What Zuckerberg and the Facebook team get, which I really don’t have to tell you (but I’m going to state the obvious anyway), is that all of these applications add value to Facebook.

Letting developers experiment and create useful tools on your service, and then letting them profit from it is a decision that just makes sense. Facebook has it’s own revenue stream, from the things that it has done (which it does better than other networks).

[click to continue...]