Facebook Crushes Myspace, Which Once Ruled

Uh oh. The trade press is buzzing over the possible demise of once-powerful Myspace. Below is a snip from Jason Lee Miller, staff writer for Web Pro News, and his thoughts echo my own. I used to update a Myspace page, now I hardly ever bother to go there. Facebook seems to have zoomed way ahead. This will be like what happened to Friendster, remember them, before Myspace and Facebook?

“High school student Jacob Ruffman, quoted today by McClatchy, has his own more teenage reasons. “I can go to the Facebook home page and see what’s going on with my friends. Then I flip over to MySpace and I get kicked in the face with colors and flashing penguins.”

Jacob’s at odds with my stepson, who’s 15 now and recently lamented that all his friends, like Jacob, had switched to Facebook. He could really customize his MySpace profile they way he had once customized his abandoned Gaia profile. And his parents and grandparents weren’t on MySpace the way they were on Facebook. Coincidentally, about the same time he told me that his friends had all switched, a friend my own age had worried he’d not hear important news from home if he wasn’t on Facebook like everybody else.

About that time too Facebook had started to overcome MySpace in terms of visitors. Compete.com shows the shift began late last year. Facebook equaled MySpace around December, and by January had surpassed it, a huge feat considering how MySpace dwarfed Facebook this time last year.

Compete says MySpace traffic is down by 5 percent for the year, though it still attracted over 58 million unique US visitors. Facebook on the other hand is up 125 percent for the year, and grabbed over 68 million visitors. On an international level, Comscore says Facebook is outdrawing MySpace by 110 million monthly visitors.”