Once upon a time, MySpace was THE social networking site on the Internet.  Back in June of 2006, it was the most popular social networking site in the United States.  In April of 2008, it was overtaken by its competitor, Facebook.  Despite advances in technology, however, both sites have always been on the receiving end of various types of criticism, most notably, the way they can make personal information overly publically accessible.

MySpace was created in August 2003 as an imitation of Friendster.  It was created by a number of eUniverse employees, among them Tom Anderson (everybody’s first MySpace friend) and had every advantage starting up due to being launched by eUniverse, which simply advertised MySpace to the 20 million eUniverse users, very quickly building a strong following.

Facebook, on the other hand, was initially only available to students at Harvard University (where its creators attended school), and was gradually expanded to include other Boston-area schools (including BC), and then ultimately to anyone aged 13 or over.  Currently, Facebook has more than 400 million users worldwide.

One of the major advantages of Facebook versus MySpace, for a long time, was the privacy features.  MySpace had an option to make one’s entire profile private or not, and only recently has begun to do more fine-tuning (choosing which features of one’s profile were going to be private vs. public).  Facebook, on the other hand, allows users to control virtually every aspect of their privacy.  This is a powerfully attractive feature, as one of the strongest criticisms of social networking sites is that it makes it easier for stalkers to stalk people.  However, on Facebook, many of these privacy features need to be “activated”, and as such, simply signing up for a Facebook account does not guarantee one the privacy one might wish for.  For maximum privacy, these settings need to be adjusted, and many less experienced users may not even be aware of how much of their profile content is publicly accessible.

Another  criticism of Facebook has been that it’s not as easy to “personalize” a profile as it is on MySpace.  On a MySpace profile, depending on one’s level of expertise, absolutely everything can be customized, while Facebook profiles tend to be much more static.  However, it’s always been this author’s opinion that excessive customization on MySpace profiles leads to the exact issues that too many external apps do; namely, the profile get bogged down, don’t load, and eat up phenomenal amounts of bandwidth.   Facebook has a much better integration of its “extra” features, like games, applications, etc.  With MySpace, loading those external apps tended to bog down one’s profile greatly, while on Facebook, all these things are neatly sorted.

Of course, both sites have faced their fair share of criticism (Wikipedia.com has a whole page dedicated to Facebook criticisms) for numerous issues, as no newly-emerging technology is perfect.  With so many users, these social networks are akin to vast cities, so inherently there will be issues.  While the creators of these sites do what they can to meet user demand, it’s also a responsibility of the users themselves to be aware, when in such vast cities, who they are in contact with, what kind of personal information they are sharing, and most importantly, how to prevent sharing information one would rather keep private.

Just like in any large city, users need to be aware of themselves and their surroundings at all time.  That’s just good common sense.

YouTube video concerning cyberstalking