When did Facebook get fashionable? I was just getting used to only following a couple of social networking sites and suddenly I start getting “be my friend” mail from Facebook several times a day.
And I don’t really understand what Facebook gives you. MySpace at least has everyone in the known universe on it and you can find interesting new music (well, so I’m told – I’m still looking) and LinkedIn seems to have pretty much everyone who I’ve ever worked with – so it’s good for professional networking. But I can’t really see why Facebook is so popular.
Anyway, I’ve registered and I’ll certainly hand around for a couple of weeks to see if I can work out what it’s for. Feel free to befriend me. That also goes for MySpace and Linked In.
Update: Oh, I forgot one. There’s also Last.fm if you’re interested in watching my taste in music slowly deteriorate.
I thought facebook was going out of fashion and it was all about http://virb.com these days?
From my experience, the main difference is presentation. I swear Mypsace is trying to regress the web to the 90’s – remember white writing on pink backgrounds? Thousands of moving .gif’s on a page? Ridiculous use of tags? Myspace in a nutshell.Facebook looks nicer. The ajax features make everything you do more fluid. And it insists on people confirming they know each other before you can even view their profile – so theres infinitely less spam (at least for me, touch wood). Plus there minimal page customisation and NO AUTOMATICALLY LOADING OF MUSIC so you know what to expect when you click a link!Plus I like the way it links the people together. You have no idea what relation anyone on Myspace is to anyone else, but Facebook encourages you to list exactly how you know each – just last week I tracked down an old friend by discovering that his sister was a friend of one of my contacts!!!I cant speak for the other networking sites because I havent used them, but honestly I think Facebook makes Myspace look unusable.
I like Facebook because it’s more controlled – for the very same reason I can’t abide MySpace. Everyone’s on there, it’s a uniform design, it’s more refined and just feels more grown up.As mentioned, the whole AJAX integration makes everything that little bit nicer – and there’s no lagging up of your PC as someone’s profile attempts to load every flash and javascript scroller, image gallery, music player and video player known to man at the same time – and you can actually read what people are writing because there’s no abysmal CSS hacks to put some crap image on the background which is the same colour as the text!I didn’t think I’d use Facebook a lot when I signed up, but I use it probably more than MySpace now. MySpace is purely for networking with the few contacts who aren’t on Facebook already, I never update my MySpace page.
I don’t have a MySpace account simply because most sites on there seem like they’re for teenagers made by teenagers. MySpace is cheap and nasty while the rest of the web has moved on and paid more consideration to usability, style and presentation.Facebook seems to have more of a social take on the social networking, whereas LinkedIn is more about professional associations in order to help you get a job. I’ve just started using Facebook and while it’s interesting to browse round, I doubt I’ll ever be using it seriously.Not really taken the time to look at Last.fm, but you might find Listal interesting. Seeing as I love having lists of the music, books and films I own, it’s perfect for me :)