Reasons Facebook Beat MySpace

ReadWriteWeb, a site that covers technology news, social media, and the business of technology (among other topics), has a new post up that seeks to explain how Facebook was able to beat Myspace to become the dominant social media site. Dana Oshiro, the post's author, argues that rather than the aesthetic difference causing the migration, it was primarily the introduction of Facebook Connect that ushered in the current era of Facebook ubiquity. For those who don't know, Facebook Connect is the application programming interface (API) that allows third-party developers to create applications that interact with Facebook. One high-profile example is the Facebook integration offered by TweetDeck, a popular Twitter client that allows people to also post to Facebook and follow updates from the site.

To prove her point, Oshiro offers a couple of nice graphs that show a strong correlation between the introduction of Facebook Connect and a rapid migration from MySpace to Facebook. A closer look at the charts, however, suggests that while the API likely did hasten the shift, it was one that was already taking place. One notable conclusion we can draw from this data, however, is that Facebook's decision to open up user data to third parties did, indeed, have a strong measurable effect on popularity. As more applications became available that could integrate with Facebook, the site became more useful to users. Oshiro writes, "Facebook moved from being a College forum site to a full scale lifestyle platform. Whereas MySpace is still a website, Facebook has become an entire eco-system." A recent ACLU Facebook quiz, by the way, makes clear some of the privacy risks enabled by this API.

While I do think that Oshiro downplays the aesthetics and related usability issues that differentiate MySpace and Facebook (I have always found MySpace incredibly ugly, horribly cluttered, and downright clunky), she notes an important aspect of social networking. It's not enough just to have a place for people to connect. To be truly dominant, a site needs to emphasize collaboration with third-party developers and openness. That Facebook has managed to be no doubt too open and free with people's data has gone largely unnoticed or unheeded by most of its users.