That title might be misleading - don’t get us wrong: Facebook might very well continue to grow ferociously in 2008, but I think that Facebook and MySpace will ultimately diverge considerably in their raison d’etre.
MySpace - partially due to its pedigree (Intermix, and how it blew up via musicians using it as a promotional tool) is a media company and a promotional platform. It’s also a very public platform. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of people choose to set their MySpace profiles to private… but as MySpace continues to grow, I suspect a lot of people looking for a personal social network will indeed turn to Facebook and people looking for attention will rely on MySpace.
This does not mean that every person will use Facebook and every one looking for attention will turn to MySpace. A lot of creative types might find Facebook too shackling… and alternatively, a lot of organizations might prefer the stoic Facebook look and feel over the cacophony over at MySpace.
Today’s announcement that MySpace was launching MySpace Celebrity is a testament to this:
MySpace, the world’s most popular social network, today announced the launch of MySpace Celebrity, a content channel focused on entertainment culture and related news, blogs, videos, and events. The new hub will be the premier online destination for celebrities to communicate directly with their fans and for the MySpace community to interact with their favorite stars. Today’s announcement unveils more than 300 official celebrity MySpace profiles housed within the new channel including actors, musicians, athletes, comedians and socialites.
“MySpace Celebrity is Hollywood’s new home page. Celebrities have been using MySpace since the site’s launch and it’s a natural extension for us to now offer them an aggregated channel where they can be in control of their own image,” said MySpace President and Co-Founder Tom Anderson. “We want MySpace users to connect with celebrities in the same way that they do with musicians.”
Of course, this raises two major issues:
As MySpace (and all social networking sites including Facebook, Bebo, etc.) continue to launch channels and try to target communities within communities, they run the risk of launching these initiatives and then forgetting about them after the press release has gone out. This gives an advantage to niche and targeted stand alone social networks who focus on one demographic. I think niche social networking is one area that has a chance of excelling for this reason: focus.
The flip side, of course, is that this serves as a reminder that social networking giants such as Facebook and MySpace are always a press release away from entering a niche and dominating. They will not win in all sub-categories, but with their sheer size and resources (MySpace is part of Fox Interactive Media and Facebook is backed by Microsoft with $340M in total funding to date) they stand a chance.
Disclaimer: WatchMojo.com is a content provider to MySpace TV - with eight, count ‘em eight video channels on the world’s largest social networking site.
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