In my industry it’s my job to keep my ear to the ground to stay up on what’s going on in the web world.  For this reason I have been researching out the 2 most popular social networking sites out there today.  This post is just my take, or gripes more or less, about the two and what they bring to the table.  I am sure it’s going to probably offend some of my die-hard MySpacers and Facebookers that I have known for years but oh well, here goes…

I have an account on MySpace and Facebook both that I use to stay in touch w/ classmates and friends.  I honestly only get on both of these social networking sites on the weekends because I usually don’t have time during the week to “hang out” online and do whatever it is that you do on these sites, ha.  For the longest time I used to stay in contact w/ my friends by using standard email but it seems that a lot of my friends are not even checking their email anymore, instead they are relying on MySpace to communicate with everyone. 

I guess I don’t understand this phenomenon because Email is such a big piece of today’s corporate puzzle but I am gradually getting my mind around it.  Most of my friends that I communicate with on MySpace simply don’t have jobs that require them to use standard Email to communicate, it’s literally easier, and more fun, for them to just login to MySpace to communicate.  I know that’s hard to understand but after talking with a few friends who are die-hard MySpace users I have came to this realization.  I have accepted this but have informed everyone that would normally try to contact me through one of the social networking sites instead of email that it may be a full week before I respond to them because I don’t login that often.  For the most part I think that this is cool, I have a link to my personal blog on my account pages and I shouldn’t be too hard to reach if they need something that’s important.

The big deal for me is that when I get an email message saying that someone has send me a “poke” or a “message” on one of these two sites, I have to leave my email and login to my account online to view the message and respond.  For me this is just way too redundant and time consuming.  Not meaning this in a bad way, or to dog the social networking generation that is out there but it’s just a little hard for me to get my mind around. 

Out of the Two Social Networking sites that I have accounts with, Facebook and MySpace, I guess I would have to say that Facebook is probably my favorite.  It’s a little more organized in the way it’s organized.  If you have ever been on a high school kids MySpace page you will know exactly what I am talking about, loud colors, spread out layouts, and of course loud blarings of Nine Inch Nails or whoever else they have in their playlist.  It’s actually kind of funny sometimes to look at.  Also, you also can’t discount the value of having Missing Persons notifications sent to your account, ha.  Why in the world do people do that? 

One thing that I like about Facebook that I am not real wild about MySpace is that on Facebook I have the ability to add my Feedburner RSS Feed from my Blog and I actually get a lot of comments on Facebook, I have heard rumors that MySpace was fixing to open up a way to do something similar but as of yet I haven’t been able to locate it yet.  Other than that I also like the way that Facebook has evolved, it’s a “clean” online community where you can hook up with old friends and even make new ones.

If you are a MySpacer or a Facebooker either one, you can click on my profile buttons located to the right of this post and add me to your friends list if you would like.