Facebook has long been known as a social networking site in which friends can hook up with other friends, find long lost friends, keep up with family members or even befriend their favorite professors. But is Facebook becoming like MySpace? MySpace has been a huge hit in the United States for the past few years, but recently it seems like it has lost steam to Facebook. MySpace users are able to personalize their profiles with cool backgrounds as well as by being able to upload music to play when other friends visit their page. MySpace originally started as a way for unknown bands to promote themselves. However, it seems like everyone and their little sister has a MySpace account. Due to recent scandals involving children using Myspace and becoming targets for predators, as well as the various problems with viruses, MySpace is running a close second to Facebook, which has gained steam.
Facebook users don’t have quite as much flexibility with their accounts. They can’t “personalize” their profile page with glittered text or live music streams. But despite all of this, Facebook users seem quite content with the format. Facebook’s layout gives a more professional feel to the atmosphere, which was once open only exclusively to enrolled students at various universities and colleges. Today, however, Facebook is available to anyone, but some fear that changing the rules to allow anyone to join will lead to the ultimate demise of Facebook. There has also been some recent controversy over people’s personal information being distributed as well as never really being “erased” after someone deletes his or her account. While Facebook has temporarily resolved some of these issues, it still comes under the scrutiny of its millions of users.
According to some, Facebook is not becoming like MySpace.
MySpace is less professional. It is something for kids and wannabe musicians, some would argue. Whatever the case, one thing remains true; Facebook and MySpace are both social networking sites whose main purpose is to connect people, and that’s exactly what they both do. On a personal note, if it wasn’t for Facebook, I probably wouldn’t still be in regular communication with many of my friends that I went to elementary and high school with. This is not to say that I am a bad friend. It’s simply that as we get older, our lives take on new meaning; friends move away and people have their own lives. What Facebook and MySpace does is it reconnects people who want to be reconnected. Now, any time you want to “check in” with what your best friend is doing on the other side of the world, you can log in and check their status. You can leave your friends a message, upload a picture of them or invite them to a party. The possibilities are endless. Contrary to what many people might believe, I think that Facebook (when used for it’s original intention) is a great medium with which to connect and communicate with friends. However, nothing will take the place of face-to-face communication or even hearing someone’s voice over the phone, but for those of us who live in other states or other countries, Facebook and MySpace are great options to have around.
