It has become a platitude to say that social networks will be the next big thing. Unfortunately, if you subscribe to this widely held view, you are patently wrong. Judging by the amount of media exposure social networks get, and not just in web-focused but also business press, they are a big thing at the moment. It is no wonder then that the rivalry between the two biggest players in the game, MySpace and Facebook, has been generating controversy not unlike the great corporate fights of the past.

Things happen fast on the web. Business models founded on products and services that were all the rage only months ago can be discarded overnight, only to be replaced by fleeting fads that are then almost immediately consigned to dustbins of neat-but-not-so-leet ideas populating the server farms of the world.

Troubles with MySpace

The change in the social networking business has been at least as dramatic. MySpace, the pioneering US social networking website, was bought in 2005 for US$ 580m by Rupert Murdoch, the quintessential and much-reviled media mogul, who also owns such venerable institutions as The Times and Wall Street Journal.

Mr Murdoch hoped MySpace would be a corner stone of his NewsCorp’s digital strategy. Now observers say the latter is in the doldrums. After all, the company’s digital division’s search and advertising revenue has been dropping steeply, leading Mr Murdoch to declare that MySpace “is not where we want it.”

Fast-paced change

And where’s that, precisely? Taking a look at the figures recently released by comScore, it is easy to see why Mr Murdoch who bought MySpace when it was still a market leader by a wide margin is not exactly thrilled by his acquisition’s performance.

Facebook, which had long been seen as just another ambitious upstart, namely managed to overtake MySpace in May 2009 as the leading social network in the US. It finished the year with 112 million visitors in December 2009, a whopping 105 percent increase year-on-year, compared to MySpace’s stagnating 70 million.

Facebook overtakes Myspace

It’s easy to see that, compared to more traditional industries, the pace of change on the web is furious. If it took Toyota more than a couple of decades to overtake General Motors, Facebook needed only three years to race ahead of the incumbent, the once mighty MySpace.

Yet not all is bad for MySpace. Its music-related traffic shot up by 92 percent last year, reflecting the management’s increased focus on making the website a hub for music, games and entertainment. With its thousands of DJ, band and musician profiles and a partnership with three major record labels it seems that MySpace’s strategy is shifting away from social networking as such.

How’s Europe doing?

US digital trends are usually a good forecast for what is likely to happen in Europe. Social networking’s rise has been inexorable on this side of Atlantic too.

Of the 282.7 million European Internet users age 15 and older who went online via a home or work computer in December 2008, 211 million visited a social networking site – representing a penetration of 74.6 percent.

In 2008, for example, Facebook managed to pull ahead of Skyrock, the leading French social networking site, growing incredible 443 percent to nearly 12 million unique visitors in December 2008. Myspace (which, admittedly, was even then a mature business, not expected to grow as quickly as up-and-coming Facebook) lingered far behind, posting 15 percent growth and boasting a little less than three million uniques.  In February 2009 the share of Facebook’s social networking minutes was 30.4 percent, a jump of nearly 20 percentage points over a year earlier.

And the European Parliament?

Where do these trends leave the European Parliament and its social networking strategy? The focus on two global networks as opposed to a myriad of national ones seems right, as the former are well poised to overwhelm the latter. Still, the EP has its delegations in all member states, so maybe social networking can be mainstreamed in the EP’s communication policy on the local level as well.

More importantly, the issue of how to harness Facebook and MySpace into the EP’s communication policy is gaining in stature. Should the EP duplicate its message on both platforms or should it try to differentiate between them? Given the fact that the median age of Facebook users is 35 and that of MySpace’s around 24, this should be a no-brainer.

Facebook getting older, MySpace getting younger

We are not dealing only with two different age groups here, but also with two user groups with distinctively different interests. It seems that MySpace is moving toward a platform focused more on showcasing multimedia content produced by the entertainment industry in its widest sense, while Facebook is evolving into a real social networking website where users take time to establish and maintain their digital identities. The EP’s presence on each of the two platforms should therefore be structured accordingly.