Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

The Facebook “surge” surges on, in the Facebook world at least. BUT are other social networks really “scrambling” to respond?

Moreover, should start-ups really abandon all notions of independence and declare their Facebook allegiance, as I heard Internet “court jester” Esther Dyson advise yesterday in her Web 2.0 conference keynote in New York City.

SEE: Google Beware: Facebook Love Blooms

While Dyson’s outpouring for a Facebook future was notable in its intensity, what was even more striking was the immediate MySpace rebuttal, rather the lack of one.

After Dyson rallied the audience towards an F8 world, Shawn Gold, MySpace SVP Marketing, took to the podium for his own keynote honors. In stark contrast to Dyson’s wistful imaginings of Facebook as the Web’s “social arbiter,” Gold laid out hard statisitcs showing how MySpace IS the Web’s social network, worldwide.

What Gold did not do, however, was address Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg or F8.

Dyson’s ambiguous notions of a Facebook “attention economy” seemed to leave many conference attendees a bit puzzled. Gold’s MySpace story, however, drew “oohs” and “aahs” from the audience, literally.

Nothing inspires metrics driven marketers, apparently, like big numbers, very big ones. Gold on MySpace, by the numbers:

1.5 billion page views a day,
320,000 profiles created daily,
12% of all time online is spent at MySpace,
Average page is visited 30 times a day…

Gold offered a “back of the envelope” brand marketing ROI calculation. If “only” 100,000 MySpacers put a brand’s logo on their pages, at 30 views daily, the brand would reap 3 million impressions in one day.

The MySpace story is not a uniquely U.S. phenomenon, either. MySpace proudly underscores it believes in global friendship:

MySpace is a worldwide community. Your choice will not prevent you from making friends and viewing content from users in other countries (nearly twenty of them).

What’s more, MySpace is “friendlier” than Facebook.

Tom Anderson has 183,902,697 MySpace friends, and I can see them all via his open profile at the number one (by far) social nework (or social utility, as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg insists) that Anderson co-founded and later sold to News Corp.

What about Facebook founder, and still owner, Zuckerberg?

Can I get to know him at Facebook? NO. Can I see his “face,” can I be introduced to his friends at Facebook? NO. How many Facebook friends does Zuckerberg have? Not the 184 million Anderson boasts!

Why does it matter? Because “opening up” to become a third-party application platform does not actually open up a closed Web-based application, contrary to popular perception.

Via a Google search for “Tom Anderson MySpace profile,” I “hooked-up” with the very open, social Tom at MySpace, immediately.

Via a Google search for “Mark Zuckerberg Facebook profile,” Zuckerberg, himself, was nowhere to be found.

Not only does MySpace dwarf Facebook in actual numbers of registered users, MySpace benefits, big time, from the old media notion of “pass along” audience.

Any one, at any time, can browse MySpace profile pages to their hearts content, and all the while deliver more page views and ad impressions to the MySpace bottom line.

Facebook, however, is not an open platform like MySpace, it is slammed tightly shut; No one can see any Facebook page without “registering” with an email address.

ALSO: Beware Ning Love: Where is YOUR Social Network?

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN