As you may know, I am not a fan of these social networking sites. I’m not sure why I don’t like them, I just don’t. Hearing the news of the new Google Trends feature allowing you to compare site popularity I thought I would compare the three main social networking sites amongst my friends.
I had also recently heard that Facebook had taken over MySpace in worldwide numbers but was still way behind in the US, but of course I am more interested in the UK, so I had a look at how each site measured.
Certainly at my school Bebo seemed to be the site of choice, but more often than not most people would have MySpace and other smaller ones such as tagged. But a site I saw the least of invitation wise was definitely Facebook. I know very few people who are on Facebook and I only remember turning down a few friend invitations for Facebook (I get a fair amount from MySpace and Bebo so don’t think I’m a looser ha ha) . So you can imagine my surprise when I saw how much more popular Facebook actually is, and it is still rising pretty quickly.
MySpace recently updated a bit, new look video player and a nicer interface. But it is still very bad to use. One thing I cannot get over is that in the mail tab at the top there is no link to your inbox (that would be on the top of my list to put in a Mail tab), through the whole site things don’t seem to be where they should be.
What is interesting though are the differences in different regions. Scotland seem to be Bebo fans and smaller islands seem to have no preference. If I was in charge of a small island like the Isle of Man I would make sure each house was part of a social networking site, just so I could say we were the most connected island. It would be quite nice to have all your neighbours friends and family connected like that, I’m sure that is the goal of all these sites, but of course competition ruins everything. Its the same with computers really, I think if Microsoft or something else did not dominate the market then home users would not welcome computers into there homes from fear of annoying compatibility issues.
An idea I had was to have a sort of social networking hub site which pulled information from all your social accounts and put the information in one place (similar to what Google Reader does with regular websites) This would get rid of all the hassle of checking on 3 sites and just get all the information from one site.
In conclusion, I don’t know which is the best and which is the worst social networking site. I do like the html and css support in MySpace, but I don’t think it can live off that forever. I would like to hear which your favourites are and what you don’t like about the others, I just wish there was one that really impressed me and I could get all my friends on, but that isn’t going to happen is it.
