This is a re-post of an article I wrote for Sprout Inc.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of MySpace, which no other social network has been able to replicate to date, is personalization. Personalizing a user profile on MySpace represents a desire that’s deeply woven into MySpace’s culture and community. This is one of the reasons that MySpace are different than Facebook users. True, there are MySpace users who have transitioned to Facebook as new features have been added to serve their needs, but personalization is a nut that Facebook has yet to fully crack. In this post, I’ll discuss why this is the case and how it’s about to change.

Personalization: MySpace vs. Facebook

Remember when MySpace was growing like Facebook is now? You’ll probably recall a profile page, for a friend or a band, that had a crazy background, flashing icons, music playing, and an overall chaotic user experience. While painful, especially when looking for a particular bit of information on the page, that chaos meant something important to the person who created it. However, to say it was like listening to jazz for the first time would be generous, because the chaos emerged from a lack of html standards on the site (i.e. users were free to use html poorly).

The structured experience on Facebook was very much a reaction to MySpace’s looseness. The drag and drop modular components offer some of the same features but lock into a page grid that resists personalization. No setting colors, backgrounds, embedding videos, music players, etc. That said, the standardization and rigidity have made the information on Facebook pages easy to find while supporting a consistent user experience.

When Facebook created the Static Facebook Markup Langauage (FBML) application a couple years ago, they acknowledged the limitations of their rigid structure and created a way for Facebook fan page administrators to personalize fan pages . Overnight it was possible to customize fan pages like MySpace profile pages, but users still needed to code using FBML. Combined with the fact that Facebook users were acclimated to the site’s rigidity, they didn’t exactly jump on the opportunity. And, it didn’t help that Facebook buried the application on their site.

Come Together Right Now

Different user experiences attracted different communities. The MySpace community has always been focused on entertainment and the Facebook community started on college campuses where socializing and networking were primary drivers. As the communities have grown and aged, however, feature sets have expanded and led to increasing diversity in each community and thus overlap between them.

As this has been unfolding, MySpace has been jockeying to protect their position as the leading community for entertainment, which is manifest in their strategic acquisition of iLike back in August. This was a key purchase because iLike’s Facebook music application was the first to gain real traction in the network. As such, it was a direct threat to MySpace’s ability to serve one of it’s core community segments, bands. A year earlier TechCrunch wrote about how music may be the single biggest factor keeping MySpace competitive. Apparently MySpace agrees, but acquiring iLike won’t stop the larger trend towards personalization because with personalization comes entertainment.

What’s Next

The one remaining barrier that’s stopping Facebook and MySpace users from creating personalized fan pages is FBML. The key to overcoming this barrier is a visual authoring tool that allows users to create rich, interactive, and engaging pages without writing a line of code. This is where visual authoring tools like Sprout Builder come in.

Visual authoring tools remove the technology barrier to personalization. Their drag and drop user interfaces are intuitive which makes them to learn, especially for designers or creatives who are already familiar with tools like Adobe’s Photoshop or Illustrator. While easy to use, these tools are surprisingly powerful, incorporating rss feeds, music players, slide shows, twitter feeds, etc. In fact, developers are switching to visual authoring tools because they are easier to use and much faster.

All Together Now

Because visual authoring tools export a .swf file (a Flash file), what you create can be embedded on any webpage. This means you can post a personalized Facebook fan page simply by copying and pasting the embed code into the Static FBML application (and soon, you’ll probably be able to post to Facebook with just a click). Plus, you can allow your fans to grab the embed code and share your creation on their profiles or fan pages as well. Another bonus of working with Sprout Builder is that no matter where or how many times your creation gets embedded, all the copies can be updated at once from inside the tool. In other words, you could embed your creation on your Facebook fan page AND your MySpace profile, allowing you to update them in both places at the same time and with one tool. While there are other services out there that can update your content across a variety of networks, such as Ping.fm, they won’t let you customize your entire personalized look and feel.

Sprout Builder also resolves the music/entertainment problem for Facebook because it allows bands to build personalized fan pages with music playlists, slideshows, videos and more. Hopefully, visual authoring tools will help bands reach out to their fan communities whether they are on MySpace, Facebook, or elsewhere. And for MySpace and Facebook, competing on something other than personalization should benefit all users.

Facebook & MySpace Demos

If you’re interested in learning how to place your Sprout Builder creation on your Fanpage, check out this demo video:

And if you’d like to get your creation on your MySpace profile, check out this demo:

Photo credit: thesharath

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