Facebook VS MySpace

OK, now I am just new to this whole social networking arena. However over the past couple of years, I have heard a lot of conversations amongst friends (and also people who aren't my friends) asking the question "Hey, are you on Facebook?" or "How many friends do you have on MySpace?" So not being completely blind to what these social networks are, I recently decided to sign up to them and check out what all the 'hoo haa' is about.

So I'll start with MySpace... When I was browsing through peoples profiles, the first thing I noticed, was there was a lot of multimedia! People had lots of images on there pages, video clips, and even their favourite songs playing in the background. However I did notice that many pages were fairly unstructured, and it was difficult to read stuff because people had crazy backdrops with bizarre font colours olerlayed. Hence I kinda lost interest after an hour or so.

So then I signed up to Facebook. The thing I found really interesting with Facebook, was the way that you can add applications to your wall... and you could literally choose from thousands if not tens of thousands of applications! In my opinion I found Facebook to have a more structured layout, and was a piece of cake to navigate. I also thought it was neat how your page keeps a history log of what changes you have done to your wall... but wait.. also what your friends are doing... whether they updated their wall or even sent a message to one of their friends who isn't even in your own friends list. Crikey!, if I went back 3 hours later, it didn't give that stale feeling to my page. I can see why so many people are getting addicted!

Being a software developer I then went on to browse how the whole "application plugin" thing works. One of the first things I read in one of the forums was that a company wanted to pay a deveoper to create an application whereby their employees could log their hours worked. It was now when I thought geez, facebook has really opened up its site to all comers. I mean... people using Facebook for their businesses, and also developers getting jobs out of it! It really seems like Facebook's business plan has gone past the point of just providing a platform for social networking.

Personally, I have been using Facebook quite a bit since signing up, and have also managed to track down lots of people I went to school with. Which one do you prefer? are there others?

Jim