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Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Facebook Is The New MySpace, For Grown Ups

Identity thieves will be delighted that they now have access to a whole new echelon of identities to abuse thanks to the increasing growth of Facebook. I'm delighted to hear that MySpace is on the wane, at least here in the UK. Those same identity thieves will be delighted that finally they can move away from impersonating doom laden teens, web illiterate fashion victims and shag happy 40 year old men to a better paid class of victim.

Have you noticed its approaching domination yet? The last couple of months I've been getting more and more people contacting me to check their Facebook profile. My disdain for such things finally caved in and I got me a Facebook account, just to see what all the fuss was about. Facebook has been around for years, I've been seeing my images *hotlinked* (swears under breath) for a long while, but when I first checked it out I had to be American and in a college to join. Being neither I ignored it.

At the end of last year it opened its registration to all. As I was busy at the time fabricating fake MySpace profiles, I never looked at it again. There didn't seem much point, there were no open-to-all-robots profile pages to drop links on and ain't that what social networking sites are for? So, I just forgot about it. Switch forward to recent months and the Faceboook invitations start arriving. Only thing is, this time it's all people I know. So finally, I sign up and start seeing who's about from my past circles.

The differences are striking straight away. Firstly, there's a complete class of people I know who've never visited MySpace, let alone got a profile who've got themselves up on Facebook. Don't get me wrong, the usual suspects are there in droves too, but now there's a whole lot of professional types joining the ranks as well. Architects, TV production staff, accountants, administrators, project managers and more are amongst the people I've seen getting their Facebook pages up and running recently. For a large percentage of them, this is the first time they've done something like this, and they have jumped into it with abandon (mainly abandoning their personal details that would be of use to certain evil people in society...)

The second striking difference between Facebook and MySpace is I think one of the reasons it's succeeding, is it looks a lot cleaner and for the user, it handles a lot easier as well. The apps are a breeze to add and actually, compared to the dross on MySpace, worth adding to your profiles. Seeing the way these new Facebook people are installing these apps and passing them around to their friends, the affiliate marketer in me is wishing I was able to code some cool Bingo related app for people out there. What's more, there are hundreds of potentially lucrative app / affiliate cross-over ideas out there, just waiting to be developed and unleashed.

Let's be honest here. MySpace has always been a bit Chavy, despite the droves of emo'd up ~~pop chart fans~~ alternative souls on there. The glaring colours of the pimped-up profiles, the loud and offensive music blaring out your speakers at 4 in the morning, endless requests for a shag by ugly blokes and the always endearing ability to trash your browser - MySpace is as Chav as it gets. At the moment, Facebook feels like a dapper 30 year old college lecturer, taking a cup of coffee in the local Starbucks, reading the Guardian. You can bet he's looking up over his paper and out the window, scowling at the hoodies over the road swigging Carling and trying to pry open the cash-point.

For my money, Facebook is set to win here in the long run. Sophistication, ease of use and a comfortable familiarity will see many more slow uptakers (like me) come rushing in, enthused by seeing the sorts of people already on there. Just remember - if you're going to jump in, only give access to your details to people you actually know. I'm yet to see the sort of robot spam, invitations and evil worms that have made MySpace a teenage wasteland best avoided, but given Facebook's upwardly mobile demographic - it can't be far behind.

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