top ten reasons why myspace is better than facebook

1. Traffic. No one can deny the masses that click their way to MySpace everyday. Hitwise data from December 2006 puts MySpace at No. 1, ahead of both Yahoo! and Google. They also have two subdomains in the Top 20. The mail domain comes in at No. 5 in traffic and their blog platform is No. 14. Facebook has respectable traffic, but fails to crack the Top 10. Want user data? How ’bout 155 million-plus and growing.
2. Brand leader. MySpace has become synonymous with “social networking for the masses.” Facebook, which used to have firm residence in the hip, college-only market position is now trying to out-MySpace MySpace. Ain’t happenin’.
3. Media powerhouse. Videos, music, concerts, films, comedy acts, IM and photos help make MySpace an impressive outlet to consume media today and is sure to only get more dominant in the future.
4. Rock ‘n’ roll will never die. In light of last night’s Grammy’s, one can’t deny the lock MySpace has as a centerpiece for every band that’s currently putting out music. Allowing users to feel like their one degree away from their favorite rock (and other categories) stars is a good position to be in.
5. Mo’ money. MySpace has an ownership with mega-wads of cash. Facebook doesn’t.
6. Rupert Murdoch. Don’t underestimate the power of experienced leadership, especially if that experience “gets it.” Murdoch is as smart as they come and knows media as well as anyone in the world. His empire is scary impressive.
7. Unique URLs. I can promote my own MySpace page using the following URL: http://www.myspace.com/jcheesman. Promoting my Facebook page isn’t as clear-cut. The growing number of movies and other media properties promoting their MySpace URLs in commercials and other mediums will only make this more important. Do you own myspace.com/YOURBRAND? You should.
8. Customizable pages. With varying degrees of Web design know-how, MySpace pages are easily customizable, even to the point where your page can vaguely look like MySpace at all. The Marines’ MySpace page is a good example of this. Facebook doesn’t allow such customization that I’m aware of. The only exception is for sponsors, and those seem to come with limitations and a price tag.
9. News Corporation and phat partners. If you take a look at the monster network MySpace belongs to known as News Corporation, it’s big and far-reaching. MySpace is global. And they have Google under contract to the tune of $900 million through 2010 running their search engine and contextual ads. EBay may be next. If things ever got bad at MySpace, falling back on such reserves is comforting.
10. Classifieds. MySpace has a platform by which users can post classifieds for free. No, it’s not Craigslist, but it’s a far greater leap than Facebook has made. The social networking leader is also in talks with eBay to deliver an auction platform. As far as jobs are concerned, MySpace users have access to the millions of jobs currently at Simply Hired as well. Will the deal with Jobster - who will have about the same job content as MySpace - make a big difference? We’ll have to wait and see. Interestingly, jobs posted on MySpace fail to make it to the vertical job search engines that I checked. Wonder why? At a minimum they should be on partner site Simply Hired.

When Social Web Tools Get Creative

A social network like MySpace can help you express yourself and communicate. A bookmarking tool like del.icio.us can help you save and share stuff. A wiki can harness teamwork to build a webpage about whatever it is you care about.
But these social, accessible, dare-I-say-web-2.0 tools can be brought to another level to enable you to make something you can bring back to your offline life. Then they’re not just social, but collaboratively creative. Think Ze Frank’s the ORG or Instructables or Tabblo, which was bought by HP today.
Here are a couple examples. Their user bases are relatively small, but I’d like to think that their utility will give them lasting appeal, especially on a mainstream level.

Exhibit A: Social bookmarking for the home. MyDesignIn, in addition to providing a social bookmarking tool for collecting prospective sinks and couches and whatnot, has built a Flash floorplan tool, where you can drop the items you’ve bookmarked into a diagram of your space. It’s pretty functional considering the Marblehead, Massachusetts-based company is still working on raising its first round of funding.
You can play around with the plan, get recommendations based on users with similar tastes, and eventually get dynamic pricing information. Having a social bookmarking tool just for home-related stuff is not all that appealing, but transforming those bookmarks into a representation of your own home makes the hassle of a separate account worthwhile.
Exhibit B: Social networks for creating music. If social networks are the new shopping mall, as some have proposed, then it follows that much of the activity is about as productive as Mallrats. Not to take this metaphor too far, but perhaps this particular mall could have a recording studio, where musicians can remotely collaborate.
That’s an idea that’s occurred to a lot of people: see Splice, Jamglue, Indaba Music, YourSpins, Mix2r, Rype. In most cases, these sites offer some kind of web-based tool for remixing and collaborating on music.
I think they’re onto something here, though I’m not sure it’s a business. In various interviews, the people running these sites told me they were differentiated because they were targeting professional musicians, or instead amateurs, or even kids goofing off — or because they’re signing deals to license content for their users to sample, or rather all user-generated.
“It’s almost become a dating site — ‘emo girl looking for emo boy,’” said Matt Rubens, co-founder of Seattle-based Jamglue, which has 6,000 registered users, and 50,000 unique visitors per month. “The social currency of the site is to remix a song.”
P.S. Let us know what other sites you’ve used and liked in this category.

Teapotters: The 3rd Dimension of Social Media Networks

Social networks are sprouting across the internet faster than you can shake a stick at, however a social network for 3D artists is quite the rare find. Teapotters is that rare discovery. It’s your standard run of the mill community, however just knowing that it revolves around 3D work is unique in itself.
Right off the bat, you’ll have to go through a small installation of the 3D Life Player plug-in. This will allow you to view the models that other members have uploaded and give you the freedom to zoom, pan, and twist and turn the models at your leisure. Each user is able to upload their 3D work from Blender, 3D Studio Max, Maya, Poser, and Lightwave, just to name a few. Also, on the upload page there are many choices of customization for your model(s) including: privacy preference, tagging, license selection, and whether or not you wish for your model to be available for download



On the main page there is a little summary of your activity and other various information coupled together with a gallery of thumbnails of any models that you personally uploaded. You’ll find small statistics such as a percentage of account usage, profile views, and number of times your profile has been saved by others on the sidebar. Links to your Contact List and profile editing are also openly available from your homepage. In the Edit Profile section you can change your password if needed, select your preferred 3D player (3dxml player, or virtools player), upload a picture of yourself, and decide whether you want your email address visible on your profile page for the public eyes to see. Note: using the 3dxml player requires ActiveX support. Below the main information are places to fill out more in-depth details: company name, address, website, current skills, and a brief description of yourself.
In the actual 3D interface you can pan (moving left, right, up and down), rotate the camera, zoom in and out, and re-frame the model back to its original position. You are also given the option to see the actual wireframe of each model along with the ability to smoothen the hard edges of any objects by anti-aliasing them. They also have a full screen option if you desire. You’re also able to comment on any of the models.

When viewing a model, the side bar will indicate file name, file size, object count, polygon count, surface count, vertices count, texture count, and which authoring software it was created in. If the creator has allowed it, the model and textures can freely be downloaded and experimented with by users. A counter of the amount of times a model has been download is also present. You are also enabled to add tags to models in addition to what the author had originally put for tags. Furthermore, in each model’s page there is a HTML widget giving you the code to implement it into a blog, a MySpace, or simply a normal forum. Additionally, there’s a directory listing all the currently signed up members to Teapotters. There is, of course, a listing of all the uploaded 3D models with thumbnails as well. You can sort models by favorites, and users by contributors. Models are organized by tags and the program in which they were created in is also indicated. Another nice feature is that you are able to add any member’s RSS feed to your personal feed reader to continually be up to date with any new models from that specific author.
Members have a Contact List in which they can add and sort people into a Friends List or Business List. You can manage your contacts, invite new contacts, and view your contact history in the “Manage Connections” portion of the site. They have a small “How It Works” section, describing briefly how to use Teapotters and you’ll find a demo video in this section as well, if you’re slightly confused on procedures. They also have a small blog to keep you informed on any updates done to the website. Also, some of the models that have been uploaded to Teapotters are actual models from popular games on the market currently. Who wouldn’t be at least curious to examine in detail how exactly these figures were constructed? I wish they gave members more than a single invite to give away to anyone interested in the community. However, this small downfall is easily trumped by how functional and organized the network is.
Teapotters was a nice fork in the road on the endless avenue of mundane social networks that are blanketing the internet like the plague. There aren’t many 3D networks are out there that can adequately present your work as well as Teapotters does. I’m anxious to see how well they do once they’re out of private beta.

Google Launches Pay-Per-Action; a Threat to Affiliate Networks?

If you’re reading this post, then you can expect a flurry of news covering Google’s beta launch of its Pay-Per-Action (PPA) product for AdWords. Yep, after years of hinting, Google is finally ready to let us test their platform on a CPA (cost per action) model. (If this sounds familiar, reports surfaced back in June, that Google was offering a limited test of CPA)
The beta test is restricted to AdSense for content in the U.S., will run separate from the regular auction model, and you may not even get a chance to test it for a few weeks, while they roll it out. That being said, this is a significant expansion of the CPC (cost per click) model, with advertisers being given the option of paying when a customer buys a product, signs up for a newsletter, or completes any other actionable task on the advertiser’s web site.
On the publishing side, AdSense publishers will be able to opt-in to display PPA ads from Google and even whether they wish to display a single ad, a cluster of ads or match to a specific keyword that is relevant to their page content. Publishers also get to preview the ads, including company name, logo etc, before the ads go live.
As the broker between the advertiser and the publisher, Google will take its cut of any incentive offered. For example, if the advertiser offers $2 per sign-up, the publisher may see only $1.50 offered for the same sign-up. Google will pass on to publishers the net-incentive only.
Publishers also get a new “text link ad” format (I wonder what Patrick Gavin will have to say about that), which allows them to display JavaScript ads that appear as a single text link. Publishers will be able to search for text link ads that match their chosen text string. Perfect for bloggers looking to monetize their site, but would prefer to add embedded text links, rather than whole blocks of ads.
Now, here’s where my post title comes in to play.
A platform that allows advertisers to offer a reward based upon a sale or sign-up?
A platform that allows publishers to select text, flash or images when displaying advertisers incentives?
What does that sound like to you?
To me, it sounds like a clear threat to the likes of Commission Junction or LinkShare – or any other affiliate marketing network. Google, for all intents and purposes, has just entered the affiliate marketing arena, with the battle cry that they can do affiliate marketing better than the affiliate networks can.
Now, I feel obliged to inform you that when I posed this suggestion to Rob Kniaz, product manager for Google’s advertising products, he was very quick to deny any intention to compete in the affiliate network space. “We think this is different from the traditional affiliate marketing industry”, said Kniaz. “[It’s an] extension of the current AdWords product”. Oh really? Kind of like how Google doesn’t see itself competing with Microsoft’s office suite.
When I pushed Kniaz to explain why Google is so keen to distance itself from any associations with affiliate networks, his response was that the new PPA platform offered “more automation, more options, more control” than affiliate networks.
Sounds like fighting words to me!
UPDATE: You can view more details of PPA here.

Web 2.0 - Over and Out

Many of us in the VC community have been quietly wondering about the state of Web 2.0 innovation. We aren’t seeing much. Startup activity remains strong, but the consumer web landscape seems to be populated with the same bodies with different skins. Another video deal here; another social networking deal there, and social [feature] everywhere. k'l
The apogee of this Web 2.0 hit me on Friday when I was having lunch with my daughter in San Francisco. There was a conversation at the table next to us between a 30-something and a 50-something, The younger was explaining to the elder that they had web site with the following attributes

Users can share any kind of information from files to photos Storage isn’t expensive, so we don’t police it today, yet Users can invite their friends; that’s how we get new users We launched a few months ago and are doubling every month We haven’t quite figured out our revenue model, but we think it is freemium (“Let me explain what that means…”) Of course, this is the generic Web 2.0 company template. Overhearing the dialog felt like the 2007 version of Joe Kennedy getting stock tips from his shoe shine boy. Web 2.0 is in the water, drink up.

We now know the fourth quarter of 2006 witnessed the mainstreaming of Web 2.0. It began with the YouTube acquisition, followed by a rather incumbent-centered Web 2.0 conference, culminating with the coronation of user-generated media as Time’s Person of the Year.
The notion of Web 2.0 as a wave is now rather long in the tooth, as cycles go. I believe Tim O'Reilly and John Battalle first coined the term in early 2004.
I thought one way to check the energy dissipation around “Web 2.0” would be to look at Web 2.0-centric media. Three properties that one can reasonably say are pure plays in the Web 2.0 mainstream are Techcrunch, Gigaom, and Technorati.

Say what you will about Alexa ratings’ accuracy, all three of these properties show a similar falloff in Reach from their Q4 peaks, all notably right around the Web 2.0 Conference.

I am not suggesting that Web 2.0 services are losing steam. On the contrary, the concepts are quite main stream. Take the poster child for user-generated participatory content - Wikipedia (below). It's a monster.

Much of the "easy" innovation seems to have been wrung out of the Web 2.0 wave. Web 2.0 was cheap - thanks to open source, simple - thanks to RSS/REST, and distinctive - thanks to AJAX and Flash. It helped more than a little the Google has continued to entice us all with the abundant profits in Internet advertising.

Now the hard work begins, again. The next wave of innovation isn't going to be as easy. The hard problems in the WWW are no longer usability or ease of everyday content creation. These problems are solved. Digital cameras, SixApart, WordPress, and digital video cameras showed us how ease it could be. Now the hard part is moving from Web-as-Digital-Printing-Press to true Web-as-Platform. To make the Web a platform there has to a level of of content and services interoperability that really doesn't exist today.

The Web today still resembles MS-DOS more than MS-Windows. Every website is an island, an island that knows nothing about any other website. This is no different than the world before the Windows Clipboard. All 640KB of memory was available to whatever application was running. The point of integration was the User. As it is today. Ask anyone who uses a SaaS application.

I am not alone in observing where the world is going. The hard problems in the vision of a true web-as-platform involve all the usual hard computer science issues. How can we normalize information from disparate sources to make it interoperable? How do we get to a lingua franca without waiting for moribund standards (think CORBA and SOA)? How can we then manage the transition of legacy information and services into this world of interoperability?
VCs have always made money at finding the ideal point of friction between the Present and the Future. Profits accumulate in the gap between What Is and What Is Possible. Web 2.0 is now firmly in the category of What Is.
The only thing I can say in defense of "Web 2.0" is that it's not "Venture Capital" (from Google Trends).

MySpace launches politics channel

MySpace, the largest Internet social network, said on Sunday it has launched a politics channel ahead of the 2008 U.S. presidential elections.
The News Corp.-owned site’s politics site, called the Impact Channel, will feature links to the profiles of 10 presidential candidates — five Democrats and five Republicans.
MySpace attracted some 60 million U.S. users in December, according to comScore MediaMetrix, and about 90 million globally.
Over the past few months, candidates have vowed to use the power of the Internet to communicate directly with voters. Internet and technology-savvy young potential voters, like MySpace’s audience of teens and young adults, have been notoriously hard to reach.
Democratic hopefuls Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama, former Sen. John Edwards, and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson have all used the Web to announce their plans.
“Our digital candidates banner will be the yard signs of the 21st Century and our political viral videos and vlogs (video blogs) are the campaign ads of the futures,” Chris DeWolfe, MySpace chief executive officer, said in a statement.

Digg’s importance

Digg revolutionized social news when it launched in 2004. Since then, it has become the undisputed champ of news link ranking sites. They just recently crossed the million mark. And their influence goes far beyond those user registration numbers.
Tangible evidence of Digg’s importance: the raw number of clones and Digg gaming schemes out there. We’ve seen rigging, vote buying, profile sales, and accusations of thug rule . The dozens of clones include a not-bad SourceForge project called Pligg , which lets users “build their own Digg”.
But Digg’s ubiquity and influence doesn’t mean it’s perfect. A number of startups are tackling the same problem as Digg - sharing of good content via link submission and some form of voting. One of them, stumbleupon, actually has more registered users than Digg. For the most part, though, these sites won’t be able to do much damage to Digg’s steady growth. But many of them are worth looking at, and they all have individual features that could, if incorporated into Digg, make it a better overall service.


*Personalized refers to recommendations uniquely tailored for each user


BlinkList takes a distributed approach to the Digg model. It lets anyone get their own link blog where they can add their favorites. BlinkList then looks across the whole network and ranks the site based on how many other users added the link.

ClipMarks, Instead of full URLs, Clipmarks lets users share just the best parts of webpages. Using their plugin, you can bundle together your favorite selections of content from a webpage. This includes text as well as pictures and video. Submissions are then “popped” by other members of the community, with the most popular at the top. Using the plugin, you can also submit your clips to your blog. Currently, the site’s two pane page layout gives me the feeling of looking at the net through a steamship porthole.

CoRank confronts the mob mentality on Digg. Digg promotes stories to the front page based on the votes of the whole community, resulting in a lot of noise for users with interests different from the crowd. CoRank lets you look at all submitted links or filter out the noise by subscribing links from just the users you choose. Only the highest rated stories from your subscribed sources make your front page.

Netscape has also taken on Digg’s mob mentality, mixing in their own team of anchors to submit stories and cut out spam. The anchor’s stories are featured on the front page along with the current top 25 stories. They also got into a little hot water with their recruitment practices. Netscape has managed a greater variety of content in it’s front page, pulling 2 stories from each of the top 10 most popular channels and 1 story from each of the next 5 most popular channels.


Instead of a submission free-for-all, Newsvine implemented it’s own form of quality control by only allowing users to vote on content from the Associated Press and other user’s personal articles. Users are given a live feed of all the latest AP stories, voting on articles and writing their own on their personal column page. Newsvine shares 90% of all revenue generated by advertisements on your column page with the user. Users can also personalize their feed
OpenServingOpenServing is a product of Wikia, and the opensource version of BlinkList works for fun or profit. The concept is the same, a personal page of links, democratically ranked by your friends, but it also lets you post your own ads on the site.

Reddit made headlines when Conde Nast acquired them. The site is a favorite of mine and is still up and running, with some key differences from Digg. Reddit rankings are based on an absolute vote (+1 for hot, -1 for cold), meaning a story can dance up and down Reddit’s top page instead of being buried out of existence by a few power users. To see what’s on top now, there’s also a “hot” list. This type of voting system also means the front page can be stagnant, to the chagrin of some users , but it has also avoided Digg’s payola scandals. Another bigger differentiator for Reddit is their recommended article page, which suggests links based on your voting pattern.

SpotbackSpotback is an automated alternative to Digg, that aims to use personalization to improve the signal to noise ratio of the stories you see. You train Spotback by clicking and voting on the stories it digs up. Voting positively on a story causes Spotback to reveal the next most relevant story. One of the best parts about Spotback is that it doesn’t even require a registration to get up and running.

Spotplex is another automated link site that automatically submits stories from blogs carrying its badge. Stories are then ranked on the Spotplex homepage based in part on how many views the article generates (the algorithm is still being tweaked). The site’s automation and closely controlled blogroll seems has avoided the types of rigging Digg was subjected to, but it lacks the community of commentors that make these social media sites addictive.

StumbleUpon provides a different user experience while discovering and digging up links. You use a tooblar (FF & IE) to tag, submit, and vote for links. While the site does rank links the main experience is by taking a random walk around the internet. It keys in on Diggs greatest strength, an easily accessible constant stream of interesting links. StumbleUpon is definitely catching on, they recently surpassed 2 million users .

Social network traffic up 11.5 percent; MySpace still dominates

According to Hitwise, the US market share of Internet traffic to the top 20 social networking sites grew by 11.5 percent from January to February 2007, to account for 6.5 percent of all Internet traffic in February 2007. Perhaps unsurprisingly, MySpace is still the heavyweight in a market made up of featherweights, with an 80% share. Facebook is MySpace's closest challenger with 10% of the market.

Market Share of US Internet Visits to Top 20 Social Networking Sites

Source: Hitwise
Whilst it's hard to envisage anybody stealing MySpace's crown, Friendster, which pre-MySpace was dominant, now has a measly 0.34% share — reminding us that MySpace's pole position is their's to lose.
The fastest movers and shakers were both social networking sites that specialize in building communities around music and other media — Buzznet (up 148.4%) and iMeem (up 145.7%). Other fast growing sites include Hoverspot (up 19.6%) and Bebo (up 17.8%), which both compete more directly with MySpace.