(NASDAQ: GOOG), or Sony Corp. The analyst also says that Time Warner Inc.'s (NYSE: TWX) AOL should buy one of the other social-networking sites.
The site's leading competition, MySpace, was acquired by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) in 2005. Murdoch is now reportedly trying to unload the site to Yahoo!
for a 25% stake in that company, implying a value for MySpace of somewhere between $10 billion and $12 billion. Clearly, I must be in the wrong business. I try to keep up with the kids today, so I opened a MySpace account a year or so ago.
While I had the pleasure of finding an old high-school friend or two on there, several things about the site bothered me. I was constantly receiving "friend" requests from, say, fake versions of celebrities. The site was massively disorganized (you can only sort your "friends" by when they joined MySpace - not alphabetically or otherwise).
The layout looked messy and seedy. And it was virtually impossible to know when a MySpace "friend" had updated his or her (or theirs, if it's a band) portfolio. My tech-savvy friend Nicole sent me a Facebook invitation a few months ago.
Although I at first wondered why I needed it ...
and MySpace ...
and Friendster (the Betamax of social networking) ...
and LinkedIn, I signed up to see what the fuss was about. Facebook, in my opinion, is clearly the superior choice. For my purposes of keeping tabs in a fun way with old friends.
A clean look, a news feed to tell you when people are making changes to their profiles (and keep readers checking in periodically), and multiple ways to sort your contacts are all improvements over MySpace. Another huge improvement is the fact that it's much more difficult, it appears, to create faux profiles; everyone who has "friended" me has been someone I legitimately know or knew. The one advantage I can see with MySpace is the music feature: bands can share their material and easily provide tour updates - I see no such attribute on Facebook (yet), but it is constantly improving.
Who knows where the site could go with a wealthy benefactor at its back. Beth Gaston Moon is an analyst at (NASDAQ: GOOG), or Sony Corp.
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