Social Media - Facebook Marches On

There have been two significant announcements involving Facebook this week:

(1)  MySpace’s “Mashup with Facebook” (If you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em)

MySpace allows musicians and other performing artists to publish music, videos, gig lists and other information.

MySpace also provides a social networking capability. Anyone can set up an account, and then interact with artists and other people. However use for that purpose has been eclipsed by Facebook.

MySpace is owned by News Corporation, who have recently announced that the losses there are unsustainable, and action needs to be taken. Yesterday MySpace announced “Mashup with Facebook”. This provides links of Facebook information onto a person’s MySpace page.

Having dropped the strapline “a place for friends”, this announcement puts MySpace firmly into a role of publishing and entertainment. This leaves Facebook to be the king of social networking, at least at the personal rather than professional level.

(2) Facebook’s New Messaging System

Earlier this week Facebook announced what they say is their biggest development project to date. They are “soft launching” a new messaging service, based on the principles of simple Internet Messaging (IM) which is used for chatting. It will pool in email (by letting people use username@facebook.com addresses), and SMS text messages (at least outgoing ones). It will thereby potentially provide a nearly complete record of electronic communication with friends. Rollout won’t be immediate, but slowly over the coming weeks. Exactly how it works will then become apparent.

Incoming emails from friends will be more obvious than others, which will end up in a type of spam folder. Whilst Facebook management don’t see this killing off gmail, hotmail and the like overnight, there will be obvious attractions of changing to a @facebook.com address, at least for communication with friends.

Twitter tweets are actually shortened SMS text messages (140C instead of 160C), as Twitter was initially designed for use with SMS. Facebook’s messaging system could potentially replace Twitter for chat with friends, which is actually quite common on Twitter. Other uses for Twitter, such as following celebrities, are not directly affected. But as many such people also have a Facebook presence, the attraction of Twitter may diminish for them and their followers.

Consequences for Businesses

These two things are of more interest personally rather than for business, unless your business thrives in the consumer markets these systems best serve.

But these developments do highlight the sheer pace of change and competitive manoeuvrings with online tools. Worth keeping an eye firmly on the ball, for opportunities and threats that will affect your business

For businesses this means getting involved with all these leading tools. With each tool regularly introducing new functions and approaches, it isn’t necessarily clear which will dominate in the months and years to come.

Interestingly MySpace was a spin out from the social networking system Friendster, which was launched long before Facebook. Friendster is still very popular in Asia, but elsewhere it too has been eclipsed by Facebook. Again it highlights just how fast things can change. It also begs the apparently hypothetical question, what will eclipse Facebook and when?