MySpace vs. Facebook; it's currently the preeminent struggle for social networking supremacy. However, it's the demographical divergence between the two sites that proves to be one of the more interesting aspects to this rivalry. Why the schism?

First, let's look at MySpace. According to the data, the median age of the typical user is around twenty years old. The community's heavy focus on music, television, and movies is most likely the driving force behind its youthful constituency. MySpace provides its users with a powerful platform to make a very simple statement: These are the things that I like.

Conversely, according to the site's self-published statistics, half of Facebook users are out of college and the fastest growing demographic consists of those ages thirty and over. Groups for everything under the sun, photo tagging galore, and stream-of-consciousness status updates are the driving force behind the site's explosion within the past two years. And like MySpace, Facebook also provides its users with a powerful platform to make a very simple statement, except here the statement is different: This is who I am.

With these two elements in mind, I had the opportunity to ask some Facebook users why they preferred the site as opposed to MySpace.

Cindi, a forty-year-old wife and mother, gives her take, "I'm a fan of Facebook because as someone who is rather inept with computers, I have found it easier to navigate. I also have had a ton of fun catching up with people from high school and college that I hadn't seen in twenty plus years. Never found all that many friends on MySpace."

It seems that a domino effect of user population is one advantage that Facebook has over MySpace when it comes to the older crowd. More people in this stage of life can find their friends on Facebook, which leads to even more people in that age bracket signing up for accounts. It's a cycle of inclusion that sees Facebook rapidly encroaching on MySpace's territory in terms of overall traffic, a lead once thought insurmountable by even the knowledgeable aficionados of web metrics.

On the technical front, Facebook has ease-of-use advantage. Unlike MySpace, there is no HTML or CSS to edit, because Facebook doesn't allow users to customize the look of their own templates. This allows users to spend less time worrying about the visual appeal of their profile pages and focus on adding content (pictures, blog entries, status updates, etc.) at their leisure. The homogeneity of user profiles also makes navigation much easier, because the same information can be found in the same area on each and every profile.

All Facebook profiles are not the same, though. Third party applications give users the ability to spice things up without needing to know a single line of code. Facebook does this by offering a PHP-based platform that is very friendly to outside developers. In fact, over 140 new applicationsare added to the library each day, which means that users have all sorts of options at their disposal without any technical savvy required - just point and click functionality. To date, MySpace offers no such feature to its users.

Adding another valid concern to the conversation, "I think Facebook is so much more interactive, and the best part is that you're not constantly bombarded with 'Hey babe, wanna hook up?' messages from complete strangers!" says thirty-four year old Bethany.

She has a point. Facebook's instant messaging feature not only requires that one already be a friend with you in order to send you a message, but it can be easily disabled at any time as well. MySpace, however, allows anyone to send instant messages to a user, which provides a layer of anonymity for cyber pick-up artists to hide behind - sometimes you just aren't sure who is sending you a message.

Also related to privacy, Facebook users can only browse the public profiles of people who are in their home network. Profiles outside the network are still viewable so long as they are public, but the majority of inter-network contact occurs between people who already know each other. MySpacers, on the other hand, have complete access to every public profile onthe website.

These issues have always been a point of contention and a marker of the great divide between MySpace and Facebook. It's no secret that MySpace, despite its mass youth appeal and wide variety of content, has seen its share of controversy due to the widespread reports of porn peddlers and sexual predators using the site. This drawback has been something that Facebook has more or less been able to avoid, which adds a layer of security for those looking for a more laid back social networking experience.

The fundamental statements made by each site could shed the most light into the divide. Perhaps MySpace users are just more comfortable sharing the things that they like, and Facebook users are better equipped to proclaim their identity with a measure of sincere honesty.