Facebook, the Alternative to MySpace
I am a proud member of facebook.com. I have reunited with friends that I thought I would never see again (some of which I have forgotten about entirely, but don’t tell them that). When everyone first hears about Facebook, it sounds like the greatest thing in the world. When you find a friend you haven’t seen since junior high, your face lights up. Just like myspace.com and no name brands that were copies of MySpace, you can:
– send messages to people
– write a comment on their profile – but now they call it your “wall”
– put up (a) picture(s) of yourself – but now other people can post pictures up of you
– and of course you still have a profile with a list of your personal information (meaning lie about your info, put up only ugly pictures of yourself or of ugly people, change your settings to only let a limited amount of people see your info, or you can deal with the alternative – stalkers!)
There are a few more similarities, but let’s look at the differences of MySpace and Facebook to see why Facebook is just so unique:
MySpace
Very music oriented
More school/college oriented
A general way to make new friends, sometimes from random places
A great way to further introduce yourself to someone you probably met in school or to get in touch with an old friend
As a result of the randomness of meeting people is more stalker oriented
Slightly safer as a result of being limited to only college kids (you can only log onto Facebook with the email address given to you by your school)
You can search for people by distance from a specified area
You can search for people by school
Has a bulletin where you can send something out that all your friends would be able to read
Has the “poke” feature, where you can “poke” your friends (it shows up on their front page as they log in that they have been poked by so and so) – a playful way of getting someone’s attention, possibly used as a way of flirting
A largely negative feature of MySpace is that the people you meet on it, you will probably never see again
A negative feature of Facebook is that although these people are supposedly your “friends,” when it is your friend’s birthday, it is shot out at you when you first login “It is” so and so’s “birthday today!” Now though some people might get some sort of satisfaction that they just had 50 people say happy birthday to them on their birthday, some people really want to know “so which one of my ‘friends’ really knew it was my birthday or actually even cared?”
Facebook or MySpace: which one is right for you (if any at all)?
