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Social Spaces: Facebook versus MySpace versus Google Plus
Team : Collyn, Robert, Pat, Martin
Each Social Space discussed under the following headings
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Profile
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Gap-Identified
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Technology Employed
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Solutions and Sustainability
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Discussion
MySpace
Introduction- company profiles
Firstly...
MySpace
•My Space was started by a group of E-Universe employees in Los
Angeles 2003
•At its peak MySpace had 16000 workers and had its 100 million
subscribers in 2008.
Mission statement:
Myspace, Inc. is a leading social entertainment destination powered by the passions of
fans. Aimed at a Gen Y audience, Myspace drives social interaction by providing a highly
personalised experience around entertainment and connecting people to the music,
celebrities, TV, movies, and games that they love. These entertainment experiences are
available through multiple platforms, including online, mobile devices, and offline events.
Gap Identified
MySpace
•Anyone who visits MySpace can see relatively quickly that Music is
important to its users. From the very beginning users would friend
people with a similar tastes in music.
•Sharing your taste in music meant sharing videos of bands and friend
bands pages
• At the time in 2003 paper magazines were popular, my space was
perceived as an online rival to the magazine industry, with the
additional features of videos and real time communication
Technology Employed
MySpace
•Cold Fusion technology was employed for the main site
•Additional service for example
•(IM) Instant message , Karaoke
were built in house
•Games were outsourced
COMPETITORS
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Friendster
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Magazines
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Tribe.net
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Bebo
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Facebook
SOLUTION
• A platform for new music /bands
• Communication for like minded people
SUSTAINABILITY
• News CORP (good riddance)
• New Blood (Timberlake)
• New Image, simple website
Facebook
Introduction- company profiles
Facebook
•The brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg, a computer science and psychology
double major from Harvard,
• Facebook in his own words is “as much psychology and sociology as it
is technology” (Larson, 2011).
•From humble beginnings of a dorm room start-up to the world’s most
popular online social.
•Launched February 2004, as of February 2012 Facebook has more than
845 million active users
Mission Statement: “Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the
world more open and connected.”
Gap Identified
FaceBook
Why, how did it all come about?
Zuckerberg had already witnessed the demand for this new
social space with his creations Coursematch and Facemash.
•Coursematch allowed users to choose the courses they would
take based on who else was taking them
•Facemash allowed users to rate other Harvard student’s
attractiveness
Technology Employed
FaceBook
Open Source Software
•Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP with Memcache
•From 1 to over 10,000 servers scalability has always been
an issue.
•The ethos behind open source software has not been lost
by engineers within Facebook. They contribute to the open
source community by working on projects like Apache
Hadoop, Apache HBase, Cfengine, memcached, Varnish and
PHP
Competitors
FaceBook
•Top social networking sites listed by Ebiz for February
2012; Linkedin, MySpace and Twitter are still well behind
Facebook both by number of registered and active users.
•Facebook has been competing with Linkedin and MySpace
for user’s attention since it started.
•Facebook overtook the worldwide figures of MySpace in
2008 but it took another two years to reach the top of the
US figures
Solution
FaceBook
Facebook differentiated itself from MySpace by only allowing
college students to join at first, MySpace was open to all. The
slow and steady pace of Facebook use in the college
campuses across the US and Europe was a targeted approach
Challenges
FaceBook
•Increase revenue from advertising without losing
users
•Pushback from users over privacy concerns
•Control issues – Zuckerberg has too much power?
•Advertising spending and attention shifting to
Google+(Listed in Facebooks IPO risks)
•New players in the “Socialverse”
Google +
Introduction- company profiles
Google +
•Google Plus is the youngest of the three social networking sites.
•At eight months old, it claims a membership of 150,000,000 users.
or 90,000,000 ….
or 60,000,000 ….
Mission Statement: “Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make
it universally accessible and useful”
Gap Identified
Google Plus+
Google needs to access the social networking market
Why?
•To enhance its underlying search engine. Smart searching
involves knowing your customer
•Google is in need of a successful social networking product.
After a succession of failures (Google Wave, Google Buzz,
Orkut (big in Brazil), Google Groups)
•May be targeting an older age range
•While Facebook has been a phenomenal success, it has left
many users disenchanted - for example privacy settings.
Technologies Used
1: The server side code of Google Plus is written in Java.
2: Java servlets have been used along with Guice framework.
3: On the client side the code is mainly in JavaScript.
4: Closure framework has been used to develop the UI. The
templating system of Closure has been used widely to produce
efficient Java and JavaScript code.
5: HTML5 History API has been used to maintain pretty looking
URLs although Google Plus is an AJAX web app. For older
browsers with no support of HTML5 History APIs, hash fragments
are used as a substitute.
6: The back end data storage is supported by BigTable and
Colossus/GFS. MapReduce is also used in the backend.
Competitors
Facebook
LinkedIn
Twitter
MySpace
Skype
User Apathy
Backlash regarding privacy
Solutions
•Due to the sheer size of Google, they can afford to stay around in
the market.
•Appeal to a more mature audience (as per the Barack Obama
hangout)
•Google has group video chat....Facebook doesn’t.
•As long as their search engine is a success, they have a captive
audience.
SWOT Analysis
MySpace
Facebook
Google +
The Low down how many users At its peak MySpace had 16000 workers As of February 2012 Facebook At eight months old, it claims a
and had its 100 million subscribers in
have they got?
has more than 845 million active membership of 150,000,000
2008.
users.
users
Strengths
Oldest social space,
Biggest subscribers
Money and finance
Timberlake at its helm creates the cool Most well-known social
Fresh new image
factor
networking site.
Hangout s and circles and
Music content is keeping its heart ticking
huddles
good Niche market
Not Facebook
They control the Gate ..search
engine
Weaknesses
Murdoch Baggage
Privacy, Privacy, Privacy
Newbee
Been there done that atmosphere
Time line upsets people
Maybe the market segment a bit
Mark Zuckerberg
old, not cool?
Opportunities
Carve out a greater music Niche while
Facbook locks horns with Google Plus
.
Threats
FAD effect , have to keep customer as
they grow old with age not just a young
site
By integrating Facebook connect Learn from Facebooks mistakes
everywhere, with different sites and listen to your customer. The
like Netflix and even MySpace wheel doesn’t have to be reWere you have to register with invented but re-engineered.
FB before joining another site. Privacy is important to many
people.
Google Plus
Market saturation.
Mark Zuckerberg
Market share won hard by
facebook and facebook wont give
up too easily.
Google has bad history with social
spaces orkut etc
End
Is this the present leading to the future.......the transition of change?
Thank YOU