MySpace vs. Facebook (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog)
I just searched Google News for MySpace and Facebook, and was surprised at the difference in what I found. Of the first seven MySpace hits, five emphasized criminal acts, and two were PR-driven pieces.
Of the first seven hits on Facebook, only one involved legal worries (in an item that also included MySpace in the title), two items seemed PR-driven, and the other four were news features that included references to Facebook organically (through a profile of the Facebook founder, or a high school paper article about the online community).
Facebook is still owned by its boy-geek founder, while MySpace was recently bought out by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorporation (which also owns Fox, TV Guide, and HarperCollins). Of course this is not a scientific survey, but MySpace was referred to over 12,000 times in Google’s news database, while Facebook appeared only about 3000 times. Given that MySpace has about 80% of the social networking market share, and Facebook has only about 10%, Facebook is getting proportionately more positive press (though the coverage is not as broad, with an article in a high school paper happening to hold the top spot when I did my search this morning.)
Here are the first seven MySpace posts.
Here are the first Facebook hits (I’ve grouped the duplicates).