Lifeinlists: Facebook better than MySpace

October 26, 2006 Filed under: Web-trends

Evan over at LifeinLists.com posted this great comparison of Facebook and MySpace yesterday.To summarize, Evan thinks Facebook wins on three key measurements of user experience:

  1. User trust
  2. Site Features
  3. Site design

I agree with a lot of Evan's analysis, and I recommend that you read the whole thing, but on those three points (and an extra one), I'd like to add these thoughts:

  1. On trust: As social networking becomes less faddish and more integrated into our practical everyday lives, trust will become more and more important.
  2. On features: Facebook doesn't have more features, it has better features. Again, as we move beyond these few years of just playing around with useless bling on the sites, it will be the simple and powerful features -- the ones that actually give us a reason to be online -- that will be the strength of an online social network. Facebook mini-feeds allow you do compress what was 2 hours of browsing through all your friends' updates into 2 minutes of summaries. Fast, easy, clean.
  3. On site design: This is key. It's a fact: MySpace intentionally makes your experience miserable as they cram as many ads as possible into your visit. They do this in sheer number of ad placements per page as well as with the total page-loads a user must go through to send a simple message. It's a pain, and people will get tired of it eventually.
  4. On Evan's last point about the the type of users: You don't hear about perverts on Facebook; your friends are usually people you met and interact with (or at least did at some point) in real-life. Because Facebook was founded and grew off institutionally centered networks, the type of users on Facebook generally stay within comfort zones that won't scare people away.

To digg Evan's article, click here.

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