The first real social media site I ever used was MySpace, which appealed to me because it was a place to share your likes and interests, with a particular emphasis on music taste. It also appealed because you could edit the HTML and fully customise your profile. When Facebook came along I felt it was a step down in many ways, from the jump it was apparent the site had a "standardised" layout to make collection of data structured. Even when it came to your likes and interests those were structured into pages or groups to make it easier to collate the data.
In hindsight the motivation and the distinction between the two sites is clear, MySpace was a community, Facebook was a commodity, or to be more precise, Facebook was a data collection service and the data itself was the commodity. The community elements of Facebook were a second-thought, they were added over time, and constantly changed, often to the chagrin of the users of the site. The little utility Facebook offered in terms of establishing social connections and meeting people fell away when they opened the site to the general public. The mentality of treating it as an academic network evaporated overnight, I still remember the rush everyone made to delete, detag, and hide everything they didn't want the whole world to see.
