Word: facebook
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...Facebook and MySpace are trying to morph from the high school gym--a place for flirting and gossip--into one-stop entertainment destinations. "MySpace is your starting point to the Internet," says CEO Chris DeWolfe, who recently rolled out features that let MySpace members play casual games like online poker and watch mini-videos of '80s TV shows like Fantasy Island and Diff'rent Strokes. Facebook has gone even further. In August it sent out an open invitation to software developers to devise new widgets. Three months later, Facebook has some 7,000 free add-on applications that let members...
Every one of those applications represents one more aspect of your life that can live on Facebook, and the more you can do there, the more important and valuable the site becomes. (And, as MySpace recently discovered, the more tempting it is to hackers.) Search engines help you find things, but everything they cull from is public. A social network affords something more: access to the personal lives and tastes of the people in your circle, or at least as much as they're willing to share. For that reason, explains Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook's vice president of product marketing...
Will advertisers see it that way too? In early November, both Facebook and MySpace announced new schemes that would allow advertisers to more closely target messages. The idea is that if ads are made more relevant, more people will click on them, which in turn will boost the fees the sites can charge for them. MySpace's new "hypertargeting" strategy scans profile pages for keywords and sells ads against them. If you say you love burritos, for example, a banner ad for Taco Bell might appear at the top of your page. Facebook, on the other hand, involves its members...
...creepy prospect of turning your life into one big direct-mail campaign. But Facebook's Zuckerberg sees the new model as just another form of word-of-mouth. "Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a friend," he says. To allay privacy concerns, Facebook makes sharing your shopping habits optional, but it's betting that for the bare-it-all generation growing up on social networks, broadcasting what you buy will seem as natural as posting the details of a bitter breakup--or what you ate for breakfast...
...While Facebook has the momentum, its battle with MySpace is just heating up. "I don't think there is going to be one winner or loser," says Michael Morris, a media analyst with UBS. "Both MySpace and Facebook can flourish, just like there's more than one television network." Other big players are casting their lots with one or the other. Microsoft beat Google and Yahoo! in the bidding for Facebook. News Corp. bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005, and Google hosts MySpace's ads, guaranteeing at least $900 million in revenue through...