Via Bora, a very interesting essay by Danah Boyd about class divisions in social networking sites:
Over the last six months, i’ve noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That’s only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but it’s not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, American teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now being blurred. Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to Facebook. Which go where gets kinda sticky, because it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.
You should also take a look at the blog post, which features a lot of really interesting comments. I particularly liked the suggestion that “you could probably find a simillar division within blog software: MySpace: LiveJournal/Xanga/Blogspot vs. Facebook: Drupal/Wordpress/MoveableType.”
I don’t really have enough experience with either of these sites to make a detailed judgement– I do have a Facebook account, but I don’t use it for much– but the central argument at least sounds plausible. At the same time, there are some things about it that push some of my buttons, and not in a good way.
I’ll have to think about it a bit more, in my copious free time. But it was an interesting read.