why facebook is cooler than myspace

While I'm not extremely competitive, the Cheez posted his predictions for 2007. In these predictions, he posted about how MySpace is going to win against it's competitor, Facebook in '07. I disagreed.

Now, take a breathe here. I know Joel does hold the champion title for Best Recruiting Blog in '06. But I do, disagree. And maybe I'm foolishly unable to back down from his challenge to see a blog post of why I think Facebook is "cooler", but I can't resist and I suppose it's worth an explanation.

Here's why (in no particular order):

• Suggestions and Open-Souce. Facebook takes suggestions from the masses, they have all their coding open-source for people to edit and modify to make it better. I'm a huge fan of the Open Source Initiative. Why horde the good stuff, when there's probably someone out there who can help you make it better?

• Does anyone really know who Tom is? Tom is the President/Spokesperson for MySpace. He automatically gets to be everybody's friend? Isn't that a little pretentious? I mean, Mark Zuckerberg (& Co.) all have profiles but are not proclaimed on everyone's list of virtual friends.
  

• More Privacy and Less Spam. MySpace started out as open to everyone with very little privacy features. While you can set your profile to private it's very limited in it's capabilities. On Facebook, while it is now open to the public, (and I agree that having it limited to your college account did make it cool) you can still set up extensive privacy settings including a limited profile in which you can set which parts of your profile should be visible to whom. Pretty fancy, no? I personally have never gotten spam messages on Facebook either. I like that I can set my Facebook profile up to not be searchable if I wanted to.
  

• Simplicity and Userablity. Looking at the user dashboard, I don't understand how anyone can favor MySpace, being littered with ads and profiles of people and bands. The layout is unorganized and frankly, ugly. I very much prefer the simple white and blue home dash that Facebook provides. Not only that but you are able to see what your friends are updating (when they add photos, when they've posted on their blog, etc.) This is not a feature on MySpace. You have to sift through profiles, not only to find people you actually know but when you do "friend" them, you have to continually check their profile to see if they've added new photos, new friends that you also know and want to add. This method is less organized and less streamlined.
  

• Professional Use. If you're comparing the two based on potentially using the sites for recruiting, I'd think that Facebook would win hands down. While MySpace has free codes you can go find from other sites to personalize and "pimp out" (can I say pimp out on a professional blog?) your profile page, that is very useless and probably detrimental to have sparkle text letting employers know that you are a "Princess." Facebook's profile set up is even laid out like a resume. Starting with your Name, Networks, Intrests and Activities, Education, all followed by Work Experience. It's clean and again can be customized to who is viewing the page, in this case an employer.
  

• Advertisers are higher profile. I really hate the banner ads that tell you to "Pop Santa's pimple and win a Pink Razr." I suppose they work but they annoy me. MySpace has a lot of these ads. Facebook has very little advertisors and the ones they do have are high profile (credibility) and non-obtrusive. They will show up occasionally in your Home Dash page under your list of news items and usually offers you the option to join a group. A good example, if you have a Facebook account, is Nike's Group Promo for the Nike+. They are generating discussion, and at the same time displaying media to download (pictures and buddy icons.)
  

• Poking rocks. No one knows why but it does. Not even Facebook. "We thought it would be fun to make a feature that had no real purpose and to see what happens from there." And Matt Martone wrote a hilarious post about his experience with this feature a while back.
  

I guess only time will tell what happens with these two sites and who will beat out the other in coolness. I certainly do not know what all is cooking in the development labs of neither Facebook or MySpace. As things stand today, I really think Facebook is the better of the two sites, for personal and for professional use. However, one thing MySpace does have is lots and lots of people, even my cat has a MySpace profile. I'm not hating on MySpace, I try never to drink the haterade. I just prefer Facebook for the above mentioned reasons. The MySpace/Facebook battle reminds me of a song (I sound like Recruiting Animal with the song references.) by Ben Folds, "Yeah you're the s*** but you won't be it for long, cause there's always someone cooler than you."