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MySpace ID vs Facebook Connect: A Battle for Demographics

 

In an effort to remind people that it had a horse in the identity management race, MySpace last night announced MySpace ID – essentially a rename of the MySpace Data Availability project launched earlier this year to allow users to login with their MySpace credentials and import data on third-party sites. The news comes on the heels of last week’s near-simultaneous launches of Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect, two similar products from MySpace competitors (though the latter, it turns out, is more of an ally)

While much has been written about the technical differentiators between these services – MySpace embracing an “open” approach including plans to integrate with Google Friend Connect versus Facebook’s “walled garden” – another piece of the puzzle is clearly starting to emerge: a battle for the different demographics of the Web.

 

As we recently noted in analyzing the growth of Facebook and stagnation of MySpace, it’s not so much that MySpace is losing users in droves as it is that Facebook might be gaining completely new ones – users that previously didn’t belong to any social network. Looking at the partners that each social network has signed on thus far, much of the split is along the demographic lines you’d expect: Facebook partners include brands targeting more tech savvy and affluent demographics: CBS, CNET, Digg, and Hulu, to name a few, while MySpace touts more mainstream partners such as AOL, Yahoo, and eBay.

Think about it from a site owner’s perspective: offering your users a way to login without creating an account is probably going to help increase registrations, but not if your users don’t use the identity provider you’re in bed with. And from the perspective of the “big three,” the high profile partners they work with will dictate where the last mile of their users come from. For example, I’d venture to guess a CBS.com visitor is more likely to join Facebook, while an eBay user is more likely to join MySpace.

Meanwhile, Google Friend Connect sits somewhere in the middle of all this, offering users multiple sign-in options, though not returning the same benefits of Facebook and MySpace: publishing data back to social networks. That approach would work great and be the clear winner – if Facebook agreed to be a part of it. That probably won’t happen anytime soon, so until then, look for implementations that play to the demographics of individual websites and their respective identity provider.