by Mark on Feb. 1, 2006 @ 10:11 AM

When it comes to social life on the Internet there are two websites that matter: Facebook, with it's 6 million (11 million?) members, and MySpace with its 47 million. Friendster is old news and TagWorld doesn't matter.

Which is better? For college students graduating this spring -- should you stick with Facebook or switch to MySpace? For high-school students -- should you switch to the new Facebook highschool-edition, or stick with MySpace? For two websites that essentially do the same thing, it seems like a real comparison is in order.

There have been a few "facebook vs. myspace" blog posts around the Internet in the past few weeks... All Things Nerdy does a pro/con list for the two services and concludes that MySpace is better because it has more features and allows anyone to sign up -- even though Facebook has a better user interface. The Bofe Blog endorses the Facebook because there are less errors... but at the same time bemoans the fact that after graduating college, the Facebook loses a lot of its usefulness.

As I see it, the Facebook has most of the advantages: the fact that it's organized around real-world communities makes it 100 times more useful than MySpace. The design is cleaner and the directory is easier to use. The photo-sharing is much better. It's relatively bug-free, and always loads quickly. The school-oriented "announcements" as a form of advertising is useful to school communities.

But MySpace has two significant advantages: (1) after college the school-oriented focus of Facebook becomes a restriction, and Facebook hasn't yet found a way to make the directory relevant. Because MySpace is more open, it becomes more useful out there in the real world. And (2) MySpace has Facebook beat on music and video because it allows for "artist" pages.

I'll deal with (1) in a separate post... for now I'll write briefly about the lack of media on the Facebook. Every community has media-makers -- bands, singing groups, painters and photographers, film makers, etc. When I say "media" I'm not referring to personal photos, because when it comes to personal photos everyone becomes a media-maker. The same can't be said for other media; not everyone creates music and video. The majority of people don't. But in every community, especially school communities, there is a sub-community of artists that creates media that is meant for broader distribution.

Around a year and a half ago, if I remember correctly, the Facebook launched Wirehog, a P2P file-sharing application. As far as I can tell it didn't take off. Because when it comes to distributing and sharing the media from a community, straight-up file sharing won't cut it. It just turns into a way to pirate MP3s and TV shows. But there is another way to share media in a community...

The MySpace model of "artist pages" allows media-makers to freely distribute media from within a social network. Artist pages exist alongside individual profiles, and in addition to the regular profile features they allow the artists to upload media and distribute it in the network. Individuals can use their own profiles to link to artist pages, endorse media, and participate as fans. The model has been proven successful -- most analysts agree that one of the primary reasons that MySpace took off is that bands starting using it to distribute music and connect with fans. Artist pages are versatile: they can be used by bands to distribute music and promote concerts, by photographers and painters to release their work and promote exhibits, by film-makers to distribute movies, by literary magazines to distribute literature and promote their magazine, by comedy groups and a capella groups and... the possibilities are endless.

Artist pages are a great way for community groups to distribute media, and they're also a great way for community members to find out about the media that their peers create. It makes for a richer online community and a more engaged real-world community. The Facebook is sorely lacking this feature. Which is why potential competitors see room to steal market share... next week, Uspot.com is launching a social network for college-students, based on music and video. B2Day is right in pointing out that "the Facebook already has a community of six million college students, [which] is a huge network barrier to any new entrant, no matter how great the site is." So Uspot will probably fade into obscurity. But they are right to see an opportunity.

To wrap all this up and get back to my main point... for high school and college students, Facebook is a better directory. But MySpace is a richer user experience because it has artist pages that incorporate media into the community.