Facebook is the new Myspace; Twitter much more content-rich

Myspace has long been considered a shallow, promiscuous social network riddled with emphatic “Thx 4 da add!” messages.   While Myspace continues to transition into more of a music/media portal for users (with the acquisitions of iLike and imeem), Facebook has pulled ahead as the #1 social network and focuses primarily on a wide blanket over all your connections in one place.  As Facebook tries to anchor itself as a crossroad for ALL connections, users are beginning to think twice about what it means to post status updates – who will this update go out to?  childhood friends, ex-colleagues, current co-workers, partners, etc all knowing what I ate for Thanksgiving?   This dilemma (at least for me) means that I freeze on Facebook and decide to turn my attention to posting on twitter instead (even if I have an order of magnitude fewer followers).

I suspect that others feel the same way and as a result, the richness of content on Facebook is slowly fading – even as Facebook has brands promoting Facebook pages.  Twitter has successfully been positioning itself as a true broadcast platform for brands and individuals both.   On the reciprocating side, users expect information to be disseminated to them via Twitter accounts and so they begin proactively following individuals and brands to get this information.   Twitter Lists makes it even easier to categorize and segregate your “channels”.

It is true that Twitter faces the same problem as Facebook; that when posting to Twitter, a user has no control over which “group” or “follower set” he can direct a  tweet to.  Twitter Lists makes this the responsibility of the viewer since a user that I am following may be on my “social media” list but on somebody else’s “web 2.0″ list.  It keeps broadcasting simple.   Facebook aims to do the same thing but has the arduous task of breaking it’s users habits of seeing it as a general social network.   Considering that it had its beginnings as an intimate social network, this will be difficult to do.