Facebook: phenom or fad?
Aaron Geiger
Issue date: 7/1/09 Section: News
Separately, Joe Greenstein, co-founder of Flixster, a site that lets film buffs share reviews and comments, suggested that Facebook Connect represents the 21st-century upgrade of e-mail. If Google ignited the so-called Web 2.0 business era, Facebook may be ushering in Web 3.0, he said. The opportunity, Greenstein said, "is theirs to lose."
Those assessments contrast sharply to some other notable perspectives. A year ago, Internet mogul Barry Diller elicited laughter at a business conference by dismissing Facebook as "a Princess phone"-a communications fad. Similarly, Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. empire includes Facebook rival MySpace, was once quoted as calling Facebook "the flavor of the month."
But while Facebook doubled its user base in the past year, MySpace has been slipping. While Facebook only recently surpassed MySpace in U.S. users-both have about 70 million each, according to comScore-Facebook appears far more successful in holding users' attention. A recent study by Nielsen Online found that the total amount of time Americans spent on Facebook in April increased to more than 233 million hours, a nearly 700 percent increase over April 2008. MySpace, meanwhile, endured a 30 percent decline.
In April, News Corp. hired former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta to take over as CEO of MySpace. This week, Van Natta announced plans to cut about 400 jobs from MySpace's "bloated" work force.
Facebook's own lofty aims were underscored during a spring news conference where Christopher Cox, vice president of product, delivered a presentation that included a portrait of the communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, known for saying, "The medium is the message."
Cox said he thought of Facebook as simply as a Web site for college students in October 2005, when he first bicycled from Stanford University to visit the startup's modest office in downtown Palo Alto. Facebook, which Zuckerberg famously founded at age 19 in his Harvard University dorm, was 20 months old then and lacked many features it has today. The startup had about 40 employees, including perhaps a dozen engineers. Cox, then 22 and about to start graduate studies in Stanford's artificial intelligence program, said he didn't consider himself a serious job candidate.
Those assessments contrast sharply to some other notable perspectives. A year ago, Internet mogul Barry Diller elicited laughter at a business conference by dismissing Facebook as "a Princess phone"-a communications fad. Similarly, Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. empire includes Facebook rival MySpace, was once quoted as calling Facebook "the flavor of the month."
But while Facebook doubled its user base in the past year, MySpace has been slipping. While Facebook only recently surpassed MySpace in U.S. users-both have about 70 million each, according to comScore-Facebook appears far more successful in holding users' attention. A recent study by Nielsen Online found that the total amount of time Americans spent on Facebook in April increased to more than 233 million hours, a nearly 700 percent increase over April 2008. MySpace, meanwhile, endured a 30 percent decline.
In April, News Corp. hired former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta to take over as CEO of MySpace. This week, Van Natta announced plans to cut about 400 jobs from MySpace's "bloated" work force.
Facebook's own lofty aims were underscored during a spring news conference where Christopher Cox, vice president of product, delivered a presentation that included a portrait of the communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, known for saying, "The medium is the message."
Cox said he thought of Facebook as simply as a Web site for college students in October 2005, when he first bicycled from Stanford University to visit the startup's modest office in downtown Palo Alto. Facebook, which Zuckerberg famously founded at age 19 in his Harvard University dorm, was 20 months old then and lacked many features it has today. The startup had about 40 employees, including perhaps a dozen engineers. Cox, then 22 and about to start graduate studies in Stanford's artificial intelligence program, said he didn't consider himself a serious job candidate.
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