Facebook was started in, what, 2004? It went mainstream on most college campuses in 2005. By 2006, MySpace was a place for the non-college educated; the older generation never used it, the college-aged users had switched (if they ever used it at all), and the younger generation either weren't on either, or were on MySpace but aspired to be on Facebook by the time they got to college.
There were legions of people who couldn't handle how downright ugly and terrible MySpace pages were, and simply never used it, even when it was the only option.
The idea that MySpace had a "monopoly" on anything, 2 years after Facebook went mainstream, is absurd. It never had anything like the market penetration FB has, even among those online and interested in social media, let alone the overall user numbers that FB has.
I was slow to join Facebook and I signed up in late 2006, several months before this article was written. The author here was just out of touch.
In September 2006 Facebook opened to everybody. At the end of the year, Facebook had 12 million active users, roughly doubling their number from 2005. By April 2007 they had 20 million users. By the end of the year they had 50 million. The author wrote this piece right in the middle of Facebook's meteoric growth and they didn't even notice.
The press had the same blindness over AOL Time Warner. To 13-year-old me, that merger sounded like a dinosaur from the Cretaceous combining with a dinosaur from the Jurassic, but for some reason all the papers thought AOL was the business of the future. They had no sense for what was cool.
There were legions of people who couldn't handle how downright ugly and terrible MySpace pages were, and simply never used it, even when it was the only option.
The idea that MySpace had a "monopoly" on anything, 2 years after Facebook went mainstream, is absurd. It never had anything like the market penetration FB has, even among those online and interested in social media, let alone the overall user numbers that FB has.