A New World Order: MySpace Is Glam, Facebook Is Geek.(Technology)

Byline: Brian Braiker

Fa

Do you Facebook or MySpace? Increasingly, membership in one social network does not necessarily rule out the appeal of belonging to the other. Of course, each company wants you to visit their site more often than the other, if not exclusively. But both sites have been taking steps to sharpen the differences between them. "MySpace is Hollywood and Facebook is Silicon Valley," says David Card, a senior analyst for Jupiter Research. Or you could put it this way: MySpace is glam; Facebook is geek. Not that there's anything wrong with either.

MySpace seems to be morphing into an entertainment portal where everyone is in your extended network and a potential member of your audience. Its splashy licensing agreement with Sony BMG -- the world's second largest label -- announced earlier this month will give its members access to streaming videos, music and other types of content (the social-networking giant and the music studio plan to share advertising revenue). In a bid to conquer the social-networking world beyond U.S. borders, MySpace will soon be offering its 110 million active monthly users free voice chats via a new partnership with Skype (220 million strong, mostly outside of the United States). In a new service called MySpace IM with Skype, the Internet phone company will boost the MySpace instant-messaging service with free VoIP capabilities starting in November. (The companies will split the revenue, but other specifics have not been disclosed.)

These moves stand in direct contrast to Facebook, which seems to be focused on being a more efficient communications and information network. Instead of teaming with major media players to build services for its network of 47 million users, it allows third-party developers to build applications -- essentially giving geeks of the world the keys to the site. A staggering 6,000 applications have been built for Facebook just this year. "We are not a media company," Mark Zuckerberg, the wunderkind behind Facebook, announced at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco recently. Facebook is more of a communications hub than its rival. More so than MySpace, Facebook's platform infrastructure is built around connecting you to your actual friends -- hence the viral appeal of applications like ...