COMMENT Now that MySpace has officially thrown in the towel and ceded leadership in the social networking world to Facebook, it is time to declare the first phase of the online social networking revolution at an end. In the next phase, already well underway, success will be defined by more than just amassing the biggest audience.
MySpace’s new boss, Owen Van Natta, buried the hatchet in an interview with the Financial Times last week, but the numbers already told the story: at 300m, Facebook has three times more users than MySpace – though this comparison merely underlines that the umbrella term “social networking” has outlived its usefulness. In reality, Facebook and MySpace are fish and fowl, the different courses they are on demonstrating the evolving web’s inchoate nature.
