Was MySpace ever really used by anyone over the age of 16, though? Facebook's way bigger and more widespread than MySpace ever was, and has a lot more features. Not to mention MySpace was a poorly designed mess.
I don't know. I had a MySpace account when I was older than 16, but I never really used it.
Apparently, Facebook is still going
strong... Google+ tried to take on Facebook but failed miserably. There's currently no other social network that might change this in the short term.
It's kind of odd when having more than 300 million users is considered failing miserably. Granted, it's questionable how many of those are real users and how many are people who only have it because of Google's prodding people to create one, and count as "active" because they use GMail or YouTube or something like that.
It's kinda like fast travel in Oblivion or Skyrim, if you don't want to fast travel, you just have to restrain yourself.
Me, I've never had much an issue with friending too many people. Almost all of my facebook friends are friends or acquaintances in real life, and at worst they're just friends/acquaintances from years ago I haven't been able to meet again.
That said, from personal observation, the people who have the most overabundance of friends tend to be older than me, at least in their mid-30s and up. The only exception would be this one guy who was in the same grade as me in high school, who has several thousand friends, but he's a politician/businessman/activist of sorts so it makes sense.
MySpace does look... messy. And it does remind me of teenagers from the turn of the millennium.
I think I've met all but one of the people who are my Facebook friends in real life, out of a sample in the 300-400 range. Most of them fall into the category of friends/acquaintances from years ago. Some of it definitely is having relatively low standards for Facebook friends early on, perhaps because (a) not many people were on Facebook when I joined, so you friended whoever was on it, and (b) it actually was used to organize events a few years ago, so you could find out about cool things going on by someone you knew, but not very well, inviting you to them.
These days I don't send out many friend requests, in part because I don't use Facebook very often. I'll still accept incoming ones at a similar rate, and if someone I knew in 9th grade friends me, I'll probably accept if only out of curiosity (and if appropriate put them on the less-information list). But it still works out to a much slower rate of growth than in 2006 - 2011.
MySpace of today is totally different than it was in 2004 - 2006, as in completely relaunched. So don't judge MySpace of a decade ago based on what it is now. Not that MySpace of a decade ago was necessarily better. It was just very different.
Google+ was a clear successor in terms of superior features, organization, community (no parents) but people were far too entrenches into Facebook to make the switch, and now FB took Google's best features and adapted them for their own use.
For that reason I don't see FB dying anytime soon. At least another decade.
I think Google Buzz contributed to Google+'s relative failure, too. Google Buzz came first, and Google forced it on everyone with GMail whether they wanted it or not. They burned a lot of bridges in terms of confidence in their ability to run a social network, in particular one with proper privacy controls, with Google Buzz. That was less than 18 months before Google+ launched, so people still remembered it.
Had Google Buzz not existed, and with proper publicity as well as less of a push to integrate Google+ with other services for people who didn't want it (YouTube being a good example), I think Google+ could have had a much better reputation and gained more traction.
Incidentally, it's still possible to keep your YouTube account separate from Google+, at least if you created it long enough ago. I created mine in 2007 before it was all integrated with Google, and it's still separate, although I've rarely used it.
In real life, you speak every day with strangers without even knowing their names, and it has never disturbed you. When you go in a shop, the only thing which matters is that the shopkeeper helps you buying the thing you need, you don't care of whatever other aspects of his life. And he's still sort of human to you.
I hardly see why that logic shouldn't apply over the internet. As a matter of fact, this very forum CFC works with anonymity because what's enjoyable is to be only judged for what we say and not from where we say it.
With the Facebook ID logic, once you write a comment on a newspaper site, anyone is able to know what you've bought on Amazon, what movies you've rated on IMDb, which places you've visited on TripAdvisor, and how many kids you have... well on Facebook. What matters isn't what is said in your comment anymore, it's just you as a person.
I agree with Marla. Facebook did actually try to push greater integration automatically once, with Facebook Beacon, which would publish items that people bought on certain websites on Facebook automatically, without an opt-in. It ended up getting a lot of backlash since it was publishing things such as Christmas presents, engagement rings, and the like before people wanted it to be known that they'd bought them.
