Goodbye MySpace Profiles, Hello Facebook Pages

I’ve ranted before about why I don’t use MySpace, but I admit there have been times when I’ve been tempted. You can get much better technical services through hosting your music elsewhere, but the community exists on MySpace. There’s no social networking aspect to hosting your own website.

But the tides have turned! Facebook rolled out it’s new Facebooks Ads feature earlier this week, geared towards giving businesses access to advertising through the social graph. One of the key features is the new Facebook Pages which allows business to create and maintain profiles. These profiles have their own mini-feeds, are customized for various types of businesses, users can express their love/affiliation with a company or product through membership, and the business can then update those users on new developments. Check out the Facebook blog for a great overview of the new features (and reassurances about what won’t be changing, for any paranoid users or skeptics).

I discovered earlier today that Facebook Pages includes artist pages (musicians, as well as other artists, like comedians or actors)! I’m on the State Radio mailing list, and they alerted me to their new page.

Facebook has done it again! Their musician pages are better than Facebook groups and MySpace profiles combined! It appears that you can upload an unlimited amount of videos, photos and music to a page. Facebook users can click “Add to My Music” to become a fan and then receive updates, each page has it’s own mini-feed, businesses (ie. musicians) can host their own events… the list goes on!

It does the musician profile better than MySpace, and makes groups feel woefully inadequate. Yet it’s nothing terribly complex. That’s what continues to amaze me about Facebook… everything is so simple and well implemented, it just makes so much sense. But no one has ever done it so well before. There’s no single feature which is all that new in a Facebook musician’s page, but the integration of all these features with Facebook’s social graph, tidy interface, and business applications (e.g. Facebook Insights – artists receive information about their pages, such as page views, through the Facebook Page Manager application) customized and catered to musicians, amongst other artists, makes this by far the best online profile I’ve ever set up as a musician. And I’ve set up quite a few! (Take a look at my new page!)

I have no more hesitations about avoiding MySpace. The community is moving to Facebook anyways, if it isn’t already there. Facebook Pages allow me to benefit from the social networking aspects of maintaining an online profile without all the nuisances associated with MySpace.

It isn’t even a fair competition anymore. Facebook is light years ahead of everyone else.

Good riddance to MySpace!