On most websites nowadays, you'll see somewhere on the page, usually at the top right corner, links to the site's RSS feed, Twitter account, and Facebook fanpage. I've always wondered why MySpace, being the second largest social networking site by far, isn't on that list. After all, they kinda started this whole "follow/fan/friend" feature. They were the first to get legitimate celebrities to put up real profiles and allow regular users to "friend" them; I'm not counting Friendster because most of their celebrity profiles were fake back then. MySpace was the first place where celebrities actually told their fans to go the website, find their profile, and become their friend. They were the first to have official profiles for celebrities. And they were the first for movies too. Fan pages were their thing. So why are websites ignoring them?

I'm certainly not one of those who's gonna ignore the second largest social networking site in the world. I'm not buying into that Twitter/Facebook hype. I'm sticking MySpace up there with Facebook and Twitter, where it rightfully belongs. All those other website owners must be complete idiots or retarded (Sarah Palin, please don't ask my boss to fire me for using that word) for leaving them out.

I signed up for an account at twitter, and used FriendFeed/TwitterFeed to automatically post items from my feed as tweets. FriendFeed is more reliable; every item on your feed will go through. TwitterFeed will miss some of your entries, but they have analytics; you can see how many people actually click on any of your entries. I went with reliability. Next, I created a fanpage on Facebook and use an app called NetworkedBlogs to autopost. Finally, I created a profile for Wopular on MySpace. Simple enough.

After about a month, I got about 90 followers on Twitter, 31 fans on Facebook, and 4 friends on MySpace. Twitter is obviously better suited for something like this. That's why it has three times as many followers/fans/friends as Facebook. MySpace is the worst. The problem with MySpace is that every friend request has to be approved instead of being added automatically.

Now let's look at the most important aspect of this study - referral traffic from each social network. Despite having three times as many followers as Facebook, Twitter only sends the same amount of traffic to Wopular. Most of the followers on Twitter are probably spammers. As for MySpace, zero. Nothing. No wonder why site owners leave them out. I'm still debating whether or not I should take them out of the picture. For sticking an icon of them on pretty much every page on Wopular, I'm getting zero traffic coming back to me. That's pathetic.