Why Facebook Beat MySpace: A Study of Behavior changes across a network
Article: http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/former-myspace-ceo-reveals-what-facebook-did-right-to-dominate-social-media/
First People on Facebook: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ultimate-cool-kids-meet-the-20-first-ever-facebook-users-2012-2#13-zach-bercu-8
First schools on Facebook: https://www.quora.com/In-what-order-did-Facebook-open-to-college-and-university-campuses
Back in 2006, MySpace was one of the most popular and active websites on the internet. With daily active users surpassing that of Google, Yahoo Mail, or Facebook, MySpace seemed like it would stand tall as a social network for years to come. However, 10 years later, MySpace has failed and seems to be a virtually inactive network, and Facebook is widely popular and hailed as the most active social network. Former CEO of MySpace Mike Jones explained that Facebook’s use of real names accounted largely for Facebook’s success over MySpace, but that reason alone isn’t enough to account for Facebook’s wide success over MySpace. What would cause nearly every MySpace user to switch to Facebook, even those who use fake names on Facebook to remain anonymous? Instead, the insights from Mike Jones might hint at an underlying network concept of switching behaviors across a network can be at play here.
We learned in class that behaviors can spread across a network depending on where they start. In the case of the global network that we see today as Facebook, adoption of Facebook started with students at Harvard who knew the creator of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook initially started as a social networking site for university students. Whether this was an intentional means of starting in order to beat MySpace, or an accident due to what was convenient, starting with university students adopting the behavior is an effective way to spread the behavior across a global network. According to research compiled on business insider, the first few people to sign up, other than Mark Zuckerberg and other developers for the site, were close friends, mutual friends of multiple developers. This makes sense: since the developers worked together, they likely had strong bonds between them and mutual friends. Since the developers all joined the site, their mutual friends saw the benefit of Facebook over MySpace. Not only did they get to use their real names, but their friends were also on the site. From there, Facebook spread to the rest of Harvard. From Harvard, Facebook continued to spread to other schools. According to research compiled on Quora, the first few schools to adopt Facebook behavior were all extremely prestigious schools considered the best in the country. Students graduating from those schools are often treated with respect and admiration based off that merit alone. In a network, these students are likely to have the most influence on the network, with many individuals trying to establish connections with these nodes (graduates). As a result, when these popular and powerful nodes adopt a behavior, it is more likely to fully cascade down the network, leading to the global popularity of Facebook today.