by Kirsty Fowler

Created on: November 03, 2009   Last Updated: November 26, 2009

MySpace and Facebook were both founded in 2003, however MySpace quickly became a hit, but it wasn't until September 2005 that Facebook became readily available across the World Wide Web. Due to this, MySpace had a 2 year gap on Facebook and it was hard to see that Facebook could ever overtake MySpace with this big lead and in 2006, MySpace was easily the leader in the social network arena, according to an article on

www.mashable.com in 2006; it was the most popular site in the US. Three years later however, things have changed

According to Facebook's own statistics on their Press Room page they now have over 300 million active users on the site whereas MySpace state on their website that they have 125 million monthly active users around the globe, and 66 million of those unique users are situated within the United States alone. For a site that has been open to the public almost 2 years longer than Facebook, MySpace has really been taken over by the younger and now more detailed social networking site.

Despite the fact that Facebook has more than double the amount of users, MySpace will probably never become obsolete. It may no longer be considered a 'Social Networking' site, but it is still a leader in what it is good at and that is giving new musicians the possibility to host their music in the form of playlists and hopefully for a few lucky ones, use their own record label, "MySpace Records" to help realise the dreams of some talented musicians on their website.

Facebook is not the reason behind MySpace not being as popular as it once was; this falls to sites like YouTube which are probably the biggest threat that MySpace currently has. YouTube uses a lot of the applications that MySpace also use, and it is one of the fastest growing websites on the World Wide Web. MySpace however is still considered a lot more sophisticated for new musicians, and in terms of user engagement has a lot more visitors than YouTube has, and these members spend a lot more time watching videos and listening to music, more so than they do on YouTube as show in

www.blog.compete.com. YouTube is currently growing by the second however; whereas MySpace seems to be going at the same pace that it was a few years ago so this could change in time.

Facebook's popularity and the addition of new applications every week means that it's constantly bringing in new users each day, as shown in the graph on

www.techcrunch.com, MySpace's total unique visitors does not fluctuate much at all, whereas Facebook's total unique visitors has skyrocketed and seems to be still be skyrocketing every single week. Does this mean that they are the reason behind MySpace being deemed as uncool in some places? Partially.

Without sites like Facebook, Bebo and even Twitter, MySpace would still be considered as a 'Social Networking site' however due to the fact that these sites are doing so well and are completely different to MySpace, it is no longer deemed as a Social Networking site, it seems to be considered as just a site to upload your music to and maybe be good enough to get a record contract with their own record company. MySpace is not uncool and will probably never be obsolete, the social networking side of things has collapsed and it is no longer considered as somewhere to 'keep in contact' with your friends, however in terms of user engagement, the site is getting more hits and more usage than one of the fastest growing websites on the web.

This has got to count for something and it shows that MySpace in some circles will always be considered one of the leaders and is in no way considered uncool to those people.

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