ICM - Leeds Design Agency

Friday, June 13th 2008

I used to on MySpace but now I'm on Facebook

It’s a pretty regular phrase I hear from my fellow social-networkers. As we ‘mature’ (if that’s the right word) through our networking life, the transition from MySpace to Facebook seems a fairly natural one…

But word on the street is MySpace are launching a global redesign next week with improved navigation and search capabilities designed to increase user engagement and broaden the site’s demographic.

It’s a direct attempt to claw back some of ‘us’ that have moved over. According to Comscore MySpace’s unique users have been in steady decline in the UK, falling 14.3% year on year to 8.47m in April 2008.
Facebook remains the UK’s most popular social networking site after experiencing a 7.2% rise in unique users from March to April, according to the latest Comscore figures.
They had 14.35m UK unique users during April, which was up an incredible 288.9% on the 3.69m users who used Facebook during the same period a year earlier.

So keep your eyes peeled on June 18th for the MySpace redesign, which will feature a MySpaceTV player that includes features to make it easier for MySpace members to embed and share videos (sound familiar?).

Whilst I admire healthy competition, surely there’s enough room on the internet for both social networks to survive? After all, we all want different things from our networks, isn’t that why we all ‘moved over’ in the first place?

So will we all be swapping back?

Will our Facebook friends disappear one-by-one?

Only time will tell.