The debate started last week through a grad's student's blog: MySpace and Facebook don't have the same cultures or the same users, according to that blogger's research.

BusinessWeek re-opens the debate today with this article: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jul2007/id2007072_502208.htm

I would like to have people's views on that. Do you think Facebook and MySpace are direct competitors?? Personnally, I think not. Like the BW article says, Facebook tends to build a network on existing relatonships. It's like a customizable start page on which you show your personality through the adding of content and applications, but you remain yourself, real name, occupation, age, no funny business. MySpace gives users the opportunity to play a role... to create a personnality from scratch, and to make connections with people with resembling interests and personalities, however fictional.

Any thoughts?

This is the blog of the student: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/

She explains how her work was taken out of context etc

Unfortunately, I don't use either, so I can't say

Well from my understanding MySpace was supposed to be for musicians/bands to promote themselves.. Thanks to millions of 12-15 yearolds not many of the people I know who are musicians bother much with the site these days.  Facebook seemed to capitalise on the bucket loads of kids that started using it for non music related purposes so kudos to the Facebook guys for seeing an emerging market.

One thing I would like to add in regards to FaceBook is the way they used exclusivity factor to gain momentum.  By starting out as college students only they captured a "cool" group of people but excluded the random people that wanted to infultrate such a world.  From a sales perspective making a product exclusive from day one ensured that there would be customers that wanted in just because they wernt alowed to. 

The 2 products are very different and so are the users although im sure it wont be long before facebook starts to feel much the same as myspace and at this point people will move on..