TWITTER = FACEBOOK = MYSPACE

I was updating my social network profiles the other afternoon using multiple screens to ensure that my profiles all look similar in terms of branding. Whilst doing this I noticed that Twitter and Facebook have started to look awfully similar. I was then very interested to see that a friend of mine, Ross, had also noticed this and shared a similar image to the one below.

If you look at the two images above really quickly and imagine not seeing the big “TWITTER” and “FACEBOOK” titles that I’ve added, it would probably take you a few seconds to see which social network is which. Heck, it took me a few seconds when I was adding those headings!

I don’t think there’s anything really profound behind this, Facebook isn’t buying Twitter nor is Twitter buying Facebook (at least I doubt it), but there is definitely a great deal of psychology behind this that could be explored and learnt from. If two of the biggest social networks on the Internet are looking a certain way, there’s an incredibly good chance that this sort of look / feel / layout is what human beings feel most comfortable with, which then goes on to say a great deal about the way human beings perceive things online. That sounds quite alternative and all but think about it for a second..

But here’s the kicker, I then searched for a MySpace layout in Google images and came up with this:

I’m not a user experience designer or anything to that nature, but even I can see similarities – If you imagine the background being blue at the top and white below that, it would look almost the same as the Twitter and Facebook designs above!

Now I said there was nothing profound, but think about this: MySpace was the in thing for a long time, but as Facebook grew so did MySpace die. But will Facebook remain forever? I don’t believe so, I believe that the next big thing will come and it really does strike me as interesting seeing both Twitter and Facebook looking somewhat like MySpace because it feels like a circle is occurring and usually when that happens the next big thing comes along. Are Twitter and Facebook innovating enough to keep their market share?

Google+ isn’t quite the same in that they have gone with the 2 column approach, instead of the somewhat sidebar/content layout like the others (for the time being that is).

Call it pie in the sky, but I believe there’s merit to this.

What do you think?