Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, Brett Brewer co-founder of MySpace who sold the social site to News Corp, said:
“There’s a fundamental shift going on,” Mr Brewer said. “Both sites are … different. We built MySpace for people to find and connect with people they don’t know. Facebook is … built around connecting with people you already know.
“Clearly, the world eagerly embraced MySpace, but as the average person has adopted social networks, where they come to first is making connections with the people they already know. Facebook has done an excellent job of capitalising on that.”
While recent stats seem to back-up the idea that Facebook is enjoying worldwide domination–although MySpace still dominates the US market–it’s not all good news for the site that started off life as a way for students to connect. A transcript of a court hearing suggests that Facebook is not worth the $15 billion previously estimated. Instead, the social network is (barely) worth $3.7 billion.
Back to Brewer. He believes that both MySpace and Facebook will be obsolete within 2 years, with a challenge likely to come from a social network that does a better job of integrating mobile phone technology.
Not sure what to think about that. While I agree that mobile phones are looking set to finally take off as a supplement to desktop computing, I’m not convinced that Facebook will be out maneuvered within 2 years. How many times have we heard the same statements made about Google?
