Why Did Facebook Have More Staying Power Than Myspace?
Since Steemit is a social network, this post is going to be more focused on discussion and comments, instead of me pontificating about my views on a particular topic.
The point of discussion that I would like to bring up today is this question" Why did Facebook have more staying power than Myspace."
Myspace was a pioneer in this new era of social networking, and it arguably had a better platform than Facebook. Myspace allowed customization of profiles which allowed individuals to have their own one page website, and even allowed bands to have music players on their profiles. Myspace was more of a free environment, that did not have many of the restrictions that people have come to hate about facebook, such as censorship, friend limit restrictions, and algorithms that limited what you can see on your timeline.
Despite all of this, for some reason that I have yet to understand, several years ago there was a mass exodus from Myspace towards Facebook, and although many social networks have come along to compete, none have been able to replicate the type of shift that we saw from Myspace to Facebook.
What is it that Facebook has leveraged to stay on top? and why have people stuck around
Im looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts.
Customization of profiles was a negative thing in my opinion, since most people are not good at creating them, I remember having trouble reading myspace pages because font colors and backgrounds were a bad match. I think in part, I originally liked Google for having a clean and fast loading search pages, while yahoo and altavista would display advertisements and use a lot of images which slowed down the loading of their pages.
Maybe because it was easier to sign-in an use it didn't appeal the "sofisticated" web user but instead managed to even get everyone's grandma onboard.
Excellent point which is one that the developers here at steemit need to address. Although the website here is very simple, the register and log in process is not. I've suggested a solution for this here.
Also, the ability to customise your own page actually made MySpace pretty noisy on the eyes. I think a huge part of the emmigration away from MySpace to Facebook was due to Facebooks visual simplicity. No matter whose page you are on, everything is where you expect it to be.
MySpace also make another mistake steemit is currently making. It appealed to a particular market that swarmed onto MySpace, leaving everybody outside that market to believe that MySpace isn't for everyone.
For MySpace it was musicians and for steemit it's crypto-heads and anarchists. We need to really be careful that we keep extending this market out or we too could be replaced.
that is a good point, facebook is much simpler, which can appeal to a broader range of people, which i guess would explain some of twitters success as well
which is another platform i have never been able to understand lol
And if you want the "conspiracy theory" type of explanation, maybe a secret unlimited budget by certain government agencies to promote FB worldwide on traditional media in exchange of (later) sharing sensitive data about people worlwide.
i think there is something to be said for the fact that "Tom" from myspace faded away into obscurity, while mark z became some big celebrity with political influence
that is another part of the equation that has always been interesting to me
Yes, the Facebook format is much easier and the layout encouraged interaction.
Funny thing @johnvibes, in telling someone about Steemit just today, I said that "Steemit just might be to Facebook what Facebook was to Myspace". The simpler design answer by @beanz is possibly spot on, and Steemit is WAY cleaner in appearance that FB was even at the beginning (if I recall correctly). Beanz also nails the "isn't for everybody" factor because Myspace got the stigma of being mainly for teenagers. Upvoted both of you on this btw.