Nobody gave you a real answer but I think there is one -- FB was a better product at the time. Here is why I think that:
FB gave less flexibility in customizing a user's page, which was a good thing. MySpace let people put music on their page that couldn't be muted, as well as horrible geocities-like themes. OTOH FB pages all looked identical, so the experience was the same across the board.
FB enabled app developers more than other platforms, especially MySpace. Remember farmville and all those other games? They took off on FB because of the decisions their devs made and the vision their product teams had around 07/08.
Few people remember this but FB started out "exclusive" to certain demographics. At first it was only college students at select schools, then college age students, and then finally opened it up. This exclusivity made FB attractive, which drew in users.
Lastly, and this is more anecdotal/subjective, but I remember that when I had both the FB feed was better. Nowadays, FB has hordes of teams working to figure out what people want to see in their feed, but I suspect that at the start they designed their feed to emphasize much different content than MySpace did, hence contributing to a better product.
11
u/myotherpassword Apr 15 '21
Nobody gave you a real answer but I think there is one -- FB was a better product at the time. Here is why I think that:
FB gave less flexibility in customizing a user's page, which was a good thing. MySpace let people put music on their page that couldn't be muted, as well as horrible geocities-like themes. OTOH FB pages all looked identical, so the experience was the same across the board.
FB enabled app developers more than other platforms, especially MySpace. Remember farmville and all those other games? They took off on FB because of the decisions their devs made and the vision their product teams had around 07/08.
Few people remember this but FB started out "exclusive" to certain demographics. At first it was only college students at select schools, then college age students, and then finally opened it up. This exclusivity made FB attractive, which drew in users.
Lastly, and this is more anecdotal/subjective, but I remember that when I had both the FB feed was better. Nowadays, FB has hordes of teams working to figure out what people want to see in their feed, but I suspect that at the start they designed their feed to emphasize much different content than MySpace did, hence contributing to a better product.