• Bloomberg, Friday, October 5, 2007 10:45 AM

Sick of all the spam, MySpace users are leaving the News Corp. site in droves and heading for Facebook. The defection may soon become an exodus: August data from comScore shows that Facebook attracted 33 percent more users than July, while MySpace declined 7.4 percent over the same period. Still, Facebook has a long way to go to eclipse Rupert Murdoch's prized online possession: MySpace had 105.7 million users to Facebook's 69.3 million, according to the comScore data.

Privacy is one of the main factors behind Facebook's rise. For one thing, the site asks for more personal school and job-related information--it even asks you to confirm the former with a valid school email address, thus encouraging people to use their real identities. With MySpace, users have more anonymity, which analysts say enables veiled sexual predators and solicitors to pervade the site.

The other major factor, analysts say, is Facebook's improved functionality. The site is more organized, and the addition of third-party software is a welcoming choice its users are free to make. Meanwhile, the fact that Facebook is "cleaner" and contains even more personal information than MySpace has advertisers licking their chops. A new targeting system is under development for launch later this year.

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