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I was at a barbecue yesterday and the subject of MySpace vs. Facebook came up with a few of my friends.  They are mostly MySpace users and see little benefit to switching to Facebook.  I decided to take it upon myself to convince any of you MySpace die-hards that aside from casual hookups with random strangers, everything is better on Facebook.  In short, my social networking site can beat up yours!

1.  Built In Privacy By Default
MySpace is open by nature and that has been what has helped it grow so fast in the past few years.  The fact that you could go to anyone's profile on the site created the culture that it has today: young, fun and ready to mingle.  But while this helped the site grow from its infant stage, I believe it has started to hurt the site.  I'm sure I'm not alone in knowing at least one person who has had their life accidentally affected by a comment or picture seen on MySpace.  Of course, nowaways lots of people have their profiles on private, but they are public by default. 

Facebook, on the other hand, took all these ideas into consideration when creating the site.  By default, no one can see anything about anybody else except their default picture unless they are friends.  This means that yes, it is harder to e-stalk your ex, but it is also harder for your ex to e-stalk you and there is no way that an incrimminating party photo will cost you that dream job you've been applying for.  What's more is that you can set different levels of privacy on Faceook based on each person's relationship with you.  You can set up networks of contacts in Facebook and only allow certain networks to see certain parts of your profile such as your phone number, photos you posted, photos others pasted of you, etc.  Here's a look:

Pretty simple right? 

2.  The Mini-Feed
Here is the holy grail of what any social network should aspire to.  Facebook has, in my opinion, the killer app for social networking sites.  And that is the glorious mini-feed.  The mini-feed tells you at a glance who is getting new friends, has a new profile picture, has a new boyfriend or girlfriend, what they're doing right now and what they're doing later.  And what makes it even better is this EQ-like control panel:

By putting your mouse over one of the sliders, you can set up your mini-feed to show more or less of whatever types of "events" you are interested in.  Want to know when your friends are breaking up and getting back together the instant they update their profile?  Just slide the Relationship slider (the one with the heart) up toward "Show More" and get ready to be on top of the chisme.  Looking for something to do tonight?  Slide up the Events slider and your plans will basically be making themselves.  What's even better is that you can even enter in specific friends that you want to read more or less about and Facebook will adjust accordingly.  Talk about innovation!

For years on MySpace, the only way to find out what was going on with someone was to constantly check their profile for new pictures, comments, etc.  Now of course MySpace has their own version of the mini-feed called Friend Subscriptions.  Unfortunately, you have to add whoever you want to subscribe to manually and there is a limit to how many you can subscribe to!  Right now, I have 270 more slots available, but if I were a super popular blogger (which I hope to one day be), that wouldn't be nearly enough to keep up with everyone.  Also, of course there is no way to customize what (or who) you want more or less of, you're stuck with whatever MySpace gives you.  Bummer. 

3.  Mutual Friends vs. Extended Networks
Yet another feature that Facebook adds that MySpace hasn't quite copied yet.  If your MySpace experience has been anything like mine, you probably have gone to someone's profile that you weren't friends with and saw that they were in your Extended Network.  Or maybe a band sent you a friend request and when you checked out their profile, you see that they too are in your Extended Network.  Then you do a little more browsing and you find that pretty much everybody is your extended network!  What gives?  Are you just naturally this popular or is MySpace just really lenient with its definition of "Extended Network."  Either way, good luck figuring out exactly who you both know because MySpace ain't telling!  This makes it less efficient when adding new friends because unless they send you a message saying "Hey I'm so and so's friend, add me!" you'll never know where they came from or why they're adding you. 

Conversely, I'm sure it wouldn't surprise you at this point to know that of course Facebook has a better way.  Enter the Mutual Friends box:

On everyone's profile by default, a little box appears when you have mutual friends with the person whose profile you're browsing.  How convenient!  Wow it looks like we have 28 friends in common.  No wonder we're friends!  Facebook even shows you who you have in common when someone sends you a friend request.  So now you know that the creepy guy you met at the party last night was actually Jane's friend, so now you can at least make an educated decision about whether you will allow him to e-stalk your default profile picture because you were smart enough to set up your Facebook privacy preferences and you can add this guy so as to not offend him and Jane, but relegate him to the "Jane's Creepy Friends" network that you made because you planned ahead!  Man Facebook is awesome!  I can hear your mouse clicking the sign up for Facebook link right now!

4.  No More Obnoxious MySpace Pages
It wouldn't be MySpace without at least half of your friends list having profiles that look like an e-tornado hit them.  Where would we be without animated banana dance GIF backgrounds, embedded MP3s of the latest commercial hip hop song that takes your speakers by surprise at 3AM, and of course the black text on the dark black background?  On Facebook, that's where!  Despite lots of people cluttering up their once-gorgeous Facebook pages with every application known to man, at least you can still read the text without risking seizure or eye strain.  High five for usability!

5.  Whose Running The Show?
You might not think that a blog post spent the first 80% of the article talking about all the cool features Facebook has would have covered perhaps the most important feature of all: the man behind the curtain.  Mark Zuckerberg has positioned himself as the world's youngest billionaire and not without good reason.  Since the beginning, he has focused on innovation and a great user experience.  He is so dedicated to his creation that Facebook is still a privately-held company, despite the millions and billions of dollars that have been thrown at him since pretty early on.  To me that means that this is a man with vision.  His vision for the site has catapulted it from a dorm room project to the hottest social networking site on the planet and possibly the next Google. 

But what about Tom and MySpace.  Of course Tom still gets to be your first friend on MySpace, but whose really running the show?  Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. media mogul extraordinaire.  News Corp. bought Intermix, the company that owned MySpace, for a cool $580 million.  A far cry from the $15 billion that Facebook is valued at.  What this means is that there is no Mark Zuckerberg equivalent at MySpace.  Those guys are long gone and MySpace will continue to languish in the innovation category, while Facebook will continue under Zuckerberg's vision for the forseeable future, meaning that Facebook will continue to produce an overall better site. 

So the bottom line is, switch to Facebook now before you're the last of your friends on MySpace later!