One of the biggest knocks against MySpace — especially from me — was that the design of the profile pages was just too busy. Too much color, flashing boxes, music and spam.

I never even made a profile on MySpace because I never saw the need to enter that public online chaos. Technically, Facebook tricked me into joining by offering me a walled social sanctuary of fellow college students first…before snapping it away and throwing applications all over the place.

Accessing a friend’s profile took too long to load, and finding any info about the person on the page was like playing Mindsweeper if every box in the game flashed: DESIGN BY RaNdOmTxTLinX FLASH FLASH FLASH!

Now that MySpace is launching a redesign of the site to better organize it for function and advertising, are they admitting to Facebook that “the book” had the right idea all along?

Yup.

In changing up the look of the site, MySpace is saying: “We give up. You did better.”

To its credit, MySpace was first, the pioneer of modern social networking — well, besides Friendster. Facebook benefited from watching MySpace grow. Mark Zuckerberg saw where they encountered problems and where users desired more privacy and closed systems. When Facebook finally went up, they expanded slowly, college by college. This timed expansion gave them a chance to test and adapt. Of course, Facebook looked and navigated better when it hit the mainstream, and privacy features were there from the start.

While Facebook launched new advertising programs — even if they weren’t all successful — and brought businesses into its network by opening doors with applications and pages and allowing others outside of college to join, MySpace never really saw the advertising boom they expected.

Why?

Well, everything on MySpace looks like an ad, and I don’t want to click any of it. Why would a business want to throw their logo into the middle of a sea of logos, plagued with problems of privacy and illicit behavior?

The end result of Facebook’s hightened buzz and Microsoft deal was that MySpace has had to go on the hunt as the underdog. They have revised their strategy, and they are going after the application developers that Facebook loves so much.

With a redesign, they admit their biggest flaw and make Facebook look like a champ, but MySpace also finally grows up.

It was time for MySpace to get more organized, end the chaos and admit that they could do some things that Facebook showed users wanted. Otherwise, Facebook was going to keep snatching everyone up and not giving their data back.

In admitting defeat, MySpace has another chance to get back on top of the popular social networking buzz, but they will have to do more than just catch up to Facebook to come out on top.

Comments

I think it’s appropriate in this new media landscape that we start off the profiles by talking about an entrepreneur that is as close to my age–part of the reason I get so antsy about getting my own startup together.

No matter how exactly Mark Zuckerberg got the idea, he has quickly established himself as the man to beat in the social networking scene.

Zuckerberg’s launch strategy was the real genius move. By allowing only college students to login to the network and securing it by requiring an .edu address, Zuckerberg was able to provide an asynchronous communication and sharing network for busy college students. Right at the time in your life where networking becomes so important and faces are thrown before you on a daily basis, Facebook made it all easy. Colleges talked up it’s benefits and the networks spread like wildfire.

Only after establishing a strong and loyal user base did Zuckerberg even consider going to the public. By that time, he was already known as the kid who turned down $1 billion from Yahoo! when their original offer fell apart and gave him a chance to convince his board that Facebook could be bigger solo. According to Wired, analysts think he might be the United States’ richest man under 25, and Silicon Valley loves him.

As a result, Facebook is the now most buzzed-about company in Silicon Valley, and Zuckerberg is constantly compared to visionaries like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Even some of the tech industry’s most legendary figures are genuflecting before Zuckerberg. In an entry on his blog, Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen called Facebook’s transformation “an amazing achievement — one of the most significant milestones in the technology industry in this decade.” Says Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, “I’m in awe.”

Zuckerberg emerged as a true leader after turning down the Yahoo! offer and led Facebook through a transformation that would make it the beast it is today.

I remember where I was when “News Feeds” were announced. I was in class when I was invited to a group on my laptop protesting the new feature. Students hated it because they felt it would open up their inner stalkings and flirtations to all who friended them. Being a college player could never be the same. Luckily, Zuckerberg recovered with what made Facebook strong in the first place–privacy. New privacy settings gave users the ability to lock down everything on their profile if desired so that could keep friend A from finding out about friend B–or hook up A from finding out about hook up B in the college “hook up” culture.

Zuckerberg’s original idea was basically making Facebook a database for your life. In his own words via TechCrunch interview:

MZ: a social graph is a model for Facebook, we’re not trying to make new connections, but mirror the real world. On platform, the idea is providing more utilities for users, part of the bigger social graph.

The public launch was a smoother success. The site continues to grow significantly with members over 35, and my guess would be that is mostly because Facebook is far easier beast to navigate than the jumbled and flashy MySpace.With the industry looking to him, Zuckerberg now has to establish the advertising revenue of Facebook to make a business.

For all the excitement, one sobering fact remains: Facebook has yet to prove itself as a business. The site’s nearly 40 million active users generate more than a billion pageviews a day, but ad clickthrough rates are low. An estimated half of its $150 million in revenue comes from an advertising deal with Microsoft. Independent developers are drawn to Facebook because Zuckerberg lets them keep any advertising revenue their applications generate; if Facebook can’t prove itself as an advertising venue, the deluge of new applications will slow to a trickle.

Movements are being made to establish this next move for Facebook and take it officially from startup to cash cow business. With the incredible valuations coming from all corners of the tech world that some have warned against, Facebook marketed itself well enough to have Microsoft fork over $240 billion for Facebook to expand it’s operations. It’s note often that a young company gets to decide between Google and Microsoft, but Facebook did and became the fifth largest Internet company behind only Google, eBay, Yahoo and Amazon. With this new money, Facebook can launch the ad network it has been talking about for some time.

Now rumors are circulating that MySpace users may soon make a mass exodus to Facebook. While these moves are all just rumors and speculation, there could soon be a migration if Facebook continues to develop above the heads of MySpace’s innovators. The latest secret findings point towards Facebook integrating the tools of LinkedIn, the professional networking site. Allowing users to separate friends into groupings with separate privacy settings and providing resources for networking could easily bring in more users from the 35+ age group that is showing growth on Facebook and draw people away from the limited connection options of LinkedIn.One thing is for sure, Zuckerberg is not taking the easy way out. He is now worth an estimated $3 billion and leading Facebook into its next strategic moves. Via his TechCruch interview:

Q: hypothetically, News Corp buys Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace, how would the merge. MZ: it will never happen (laughter).

For more on the future of Facebook and their upcoming advertising program release, check out this article from Wired.

Comments