On the school yard of social networking, there's the popular kid (MySpace), the guy that doesn't come into his own until college (Facebook), and the nerd that grows up to be a billionaire (Google). And right now, there's a lot of name calling going on, as they all battle it out to dominate the playground.
In a recent News Corp. earnings conference call is making the popular kid look pretty insecure. Murdoch had a lot of positive things to say about MySpace, and as you can see by ZDNet's subtext, it's rather easy to read between the lines. Sure, MySpace still has big numbers, and a lot of plans for keeping Facebook at bay. Let's take a quick sprint down memory lane:
Platform
After the success of Facebook's open platform, MySpace decided to make one too. And it teamed up with Google, no less. But wasn't Facebook's open platform a method for addressing the popularity of MySpace widgets? In a sense, yes.
Ad Network
Now both MySpace and Facebook are offering ad networks, and frankly, the implementation of MySpace's may be more effective. Facebook's sponsored pages very much resemble the branded profiles that MySpace already flaunted, and its upcoming network will build out from there, while Facebook's seems to have fallen a tad short of expectations.
So what of it?