If I see something in my feeds with the name “Ron Paul” anywhere in the title or description I’m going to ignore it. I don’t even want to take the time anymore to go vote it down on Digg or Reddit for being lame campaign spam.
Could this be a case of online overmarketing? Burnout? Am I alone on this one? I hate to say that it might affect my decision in ‘08, but the fact is that his name leaves a sore taste in my mouth from seeing it over, and over, and over, in places that I would hardly deem appropriate.
Great job Ron Paul fanboys — you’ve achieved success in becoming the most irritating Internet sensation since The Hamster Dance.
Organization – Logical networks compared to… a massive pool of users, their pets, bands (some of them can tune), bands pets, and whatever else you can think of. I’ll take a little structure with my Social Network thank you.
Culture – Let’s see here. One of us is run by a young, energetic, college (Harvard) poster-boy, and the other was purchased by an ambitious media tycoon (I’ve always had a special place in my heart for media conglomerates. I <3 Rupert). How do you expect to nurture a culture of broad community when a mouseover of “TV On Demand” renders a URL pointed to myspace.com/fox?! Where’s the community in that?
Integration – Facebook Applications beat the rest of the networks to the punch. Yes critics, let’s just wait till it dies down. Just like we waited for the Wii to lose its edge against the PS3 and Xbox-360. Oh wait. It hasn’t.
Aesthetics – You give the end-user 10 pixels, they’ll take 500. In the case of MySpace, after looking through a half-dozen user profiles I’m ready to tear out my eyes and shove them into my ears. Doing this solves both visual and audio torture suffered from prolonged perusal of MySpace profiles.
Demographics – When Facebook began it was limited to a somewhat established and educated crowd (I should know, I wasn’t invited). When MySpace came around, my gerbil was welcome to create a profile. Which one more accurately represents reality? Oh yeah. The one with the inflated user-count.
Yes, some of these do bleed together but I think they each can stand by their own merit. I’m sure I’ll be called biased against MySpace but y’know what? I voted with my feet (and conscience) long ago.
[tags]facebook, myspace[/tags]