Facebook feeling MySpace’s heat…

By most accounts, MySpace continues to dominate the social networking scene.  Though I suppose that all depends on how you define dominate.  It has the most users, yes… my MySpace profile shows 179 million in my network alone.  However, Beebo had the biggest traffic increase in the last year, up 184% if Hitwise is to be believed.  In these days of rapid change to the social web, stats like that might be the most important in terms of determining the next big online social networking site.

In the same article linked above, it was found that 25% of all social networking traffic was generated from offsite clicks off MySpace compared to only 3% of Facebook.  This is mostly due to the fact that MySpace, being an open kind of network, facilitates offsite clicking, in fact, it encourages it and provides the user with a number of options to do so, including the partnering with other sites to integrate their software with the MySpace platform. 

Facebook hasn’t been doing this as readily, and they think that if they start, it is what will help them become the major-domo SNS.

This is Facebook’s goal, if Facebook’s developer, 23 year old Mark Zuckerberg is to believed and actually still has a say in the direction that Facebook will take in the coming months.  In Zuckerberg’s ultimate fantasy, Facebook becomes “the social operating system” for the Internet, wanting to do for the Internet, what Microsoft did for the PC with Windows.  They are opening up the network to integrate offsite widgets and personalized html codes.

Anyone who knows anything about such things knows all of the reasons why this is concerning.  One of the joys of social networking online is the variety in platforms.  No two social networking sites are the same, and the idea of a Facebook homogenization of online social networking is not exactly in keeping with the spirit of social media.   

I’m kind of puzzled as to why Facebook thinks that becoming more like MySpace will be beneficial.  I mean, yes, successful business models feed off of one another, company X is doing this thing that makes it really popular so company Y decides to co-opt some of that magic into their own, but one of the things that makes Facebook more appealing than MySpace for most users, it’s functionality and practicality and minimal third-party advertising.  In my opinion, Facebook could possibly be screwing itself by trying to be more like MySpace, who already has a loyal user base, why would MySpace users become Facebook users if it offers the same services and features?

One of the headline’s regarding this new Facebook development was “Not your older brother’s Facebook” which immediately made me think of Big Brother and Facebook privacy issues all over again.  This is another element of potential concern with opening up and connecting the Facebook network to other websites.  Of course, the “potential concern” is turned into a real concern if the connection between Facebook and DARPA is real (which I am uncertain of).

What I am relatively certain of is, and wrote a little while ago regarding Facebook and Privacy was: the money which funded the initial startup of Facebook (which is reported to be 13 million bucks) came from a major networking firm called Accel Partners (which also have interests in BitTorrent, Real Player, and Macromedia)  Major players from Accel sit on the board of directors for an organization called BBN Technologies.  Jim Breyer, for example, also sits on the board of directors of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

The Board of Directors of BBN Technologies, by the way, is made up of many Internet pioneers; those responsible for the ARPANET and the firm which has created the web-crawling and computer connecting software (known as XML) used by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agecy).  Here’s a clip from the 2002 New York Times article “Many Tools Of Big Brother Are Now Up And Running“    

“The first generation of the Internet — called the Arpanet — consisted of electronic mail and file transfer software that connected people to people. The second generation connected people to databases and other information via the World Wide Web. Now a new generation of software connects computers directly to computers.

Total Information Awareness also takes advantage of a simple and fundamental software technology called Extended Markup Language, or XML, that is at the heart of the third generation of Internet software… It is XML, a refinement of the Internet’s original World Wide Web scheme, that has made it possible to consider welding thousands of databases together without centralizing the information.

This, however, is one of those dualistic things about the Internet, and more specifically Web 2.0, or as I have been preferring to call it, the Social Web.  It’s a cost benefit anaylsis.  Do the costs of privacy, by creating a massive database of online use, outweigh the potential benefits of the formation of a virtual collective consciousness?  This question, along with many others, will only be answered in time… and hopefully not before it’s too late for those benefits to get some real-life teeth. 

A friend of mine suggested a Facebook-MySpace merger called MyFace… but the invite email might throw people off a bit… “Won’t you to come on MyFace with me?”