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MySpace Founder: Facebook Has Already Won

It won't please Rupert Murdoch, but Brett Brewer, one of the co-founders of InterMix Media, which News Corp. bought in 2005, believes that the battle for social networking supremacy is over, and that Facebook has won. In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Brewer says that MySpace, which was once a division of InterMix, would continue to grow strongly, but not as fast as Facebook. Between them, Facebook and MySpace have roughly 280 million worldwide users.

"We built MySpace for people to find and connect with people they don't know," Brewer says in the interview. "Facebook is ... built around connecting with people you already know. Clearly, the world eagerly embraced MySpace, but as the average person has adopted social networks, where they come to first is making connections with the people they already know. Facebook has done an excellent job of capitalising on that."

Brewer has long since left InterMix to develop an online ad network that works with both companies. He says that in the end, social networking sites would have to accept that they cannot monetize their audiences through advertising in the same way as a typical online publisher. Brewer also warns that Facebook could be usurped in the next few years by a social networking startup that offers better functionality for mobile phones.

Read the whole story at Sydney Morning Herald »

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