If you are older than me and used MySpace - what was the cause of its death? What did the primitive Facebook have that it didn't?
I honestly think about this a lot because, when you consider that Facebook could be "too big to fail", well, a lot of people would have thought that about Myspace. (Important to note that Myspace was a dward compared to Facebook but then again, the way we used the Internet then is also dwarfed by how we used the Internet now).
Instant Messaging was definitely a huge win for Facebook - obviously pretty well known that they screwed it up for a while but... they got there in the end. When you'd previously have to log onto MySpace and MSN to stalk and message... Facebook put it in one place - a big win because, why go to two places when you could go to one? So Facebook effectively killed both MSN and MySpace (though MSN hung in there for a while haha).
I think one of the main differences is that MySpace was blatantly narcissistic, whereas Facebook is narcissism under the guides of community focus.
Your MySpace profile was basically dominated by a bunch of prose you wrote about yourself, your favourite music, your top friends, and then your photos, and "quizzes" you might have taken (LOL), and so on. It was mostly stagnant, you controlled virtually all of the content, and curating your profile was one of the main activities on MySpace lol.
Then there was obviously the newsfeed type thing which basically just gave you a choice to display how you were feeling, and write something.
What's interesting about this is the way we conceive of "status". A Facebook status is just, anything you write into the newsfeed becomes your status, with 'status' basically equivalent to 'random shit someone posted'.
On MySpace, it was usually 'status' in terms of like, "what is your status, red rover?". Literally, what is your position? So people would make posts like "Brenden is... online until late tonight *FEELING CRAZY*" or "Brenden is... thinking about life *FEELING SAD*".
For the most part, I feel like MySpace was an inward focussed social media platform, whereas Facebook is ostensibly a community based platform that more closely mimics our real-life interactions. From the get go you could post on people's walls and everyone could see that happen on their newsfeed which was a big differentiation point from MySpace.
Basically, Facebook catered more to what we want, and what we want people to think we want. It's pretty crazy when you think about it. It sort of blows my mind that at one point, nearly everyone I knew was on MySpace and then they basically just all evaporated and got onto Facebook. It's amazing when you think about it. Just, POOF - we're over here now.
Fun Fact: My first Facebook status was something along the lines of "this is shit, going back to MySpace".