So the last few days I've written about Facebook. After leaving Facebook, I remembered that I still had a MySpace account and figured I may as well delete it too while I'm at it. Before I did I looked around a bit and was shocked to see how MySpace had changed over the years. It's very similar to Facebook. Privacy controls, apps you can add to your profile, status updates/news feeds, find and recommend friends based on other friends. I think the only differences between MySpace and Facebook right now is that MySpace profiles can be made to look unique and there are specific profile archetypes for people/musicians/comedians/artists, etc. and their ToS and account deletion process.

MySpace takes a couple days to "process your account deletion" so they can remove all your content from their system as apposed to Facebook which wants to perpetually hold on to anything you upload forever. Like Facebook you get presented with the same awkward forms and so on to try understand why you're deleting your account. They're implemented differently, although both use Javascript effects to present you with custom reasons to stay as you fill out the form, MySpace uses a lightbox effect, and Facebook uses an innerHTML/expanding box approach. Also of note to me and other dyslexics is the confirmation process. Facebook shows you a captcha to make sure you're not a robot, but MySpace sends you a confirmation email to make sure you're you, screening for robots and people that may have hacked into your account.

Both MySpace and Facebook are moving towards a pay to promote business model. A few user generations from now where more privacy conscious people find MySpaces privacy settings, and more people join Facebook just to promote themselves and add as many friends as possible the two will be indistinguishable.

I thought since I'm on the subject I'd have a look at some other social networking sites, specifically the generic ones that try to do it all. The Facebooks and MySpaces if you will. But this post is already pretty long so I'll just leave you with some social network stupidity I've encountered over the last few days.

I'd been using Facebook as a contact database to keep track of everyone's email addresses and phone numbers, so before deleting my account I went through and copied the latest stuff into my phone. In searching for a particular friend the top search result was my own profile and noticed that they added a note to this paradoxical result, "Note: You can always find and click on your own profile in Search." Now why on earth would that ever be necessary. Equally disturbing, if you examine the screencap below is that Facebook lets you Message yourself.

Facebook doesn't let you delete a group. Instead you have to make it secret, and then kick each member out of the group one by one. Not only is this ridiculous, but the whole premise of a secret group on a social networking web site seems odd to me.

Now moving onto MySpace are people a) stupid enough not to understand that MySpace's scope of control doesn't stretch beyond the MySpace.com domain. b) unaware or new to the concept of phishing.. c) really contacting MySpace and blaming them after falling for a phising scam, and d) still not using a decent browser that alerts you when you're on a phishing site. It's my estimation that either all of the above is true giving a lot of weight to the theory of eugenics(to weed out these rediculously lost and confused people), or that MySpace is engaging in fear tactics to keep you on their site a bit longer by presenting you with what's essentially a page full of links back to ad-supported pages within MySpace.