Social class on the internet

CNN posted (yet another) story last week on the social class divide between MySpace and Facebook. This concept has been thrown around for a while now; I think I first read about it a year ago. Basically, users of Facebook tend to be more educated and affluent than users of MySpace. This makes sense when you think about how and where Facebook got started. It originally started out as a service for students at Harvard, and branched out to other colleges before becoming fully public in 2006. MySpace, on the other hand, started out open to everyone.

I avoided the whole MySpace craze back in its day. I had a Friendster account way back when and then joined Facebook pretty late after taking a hiatus from social networking sites. So I may not be the best resource on all these sites, but from a personal perspective I never liked (and still don’t like) MySpace. Every profile page I looked at had HTML diarrhea all over the place. It was the most cluttered busy obnoxious site I could imagine, and I couldn’t comprehend why people needed to add so much junk to their profile pages. It appeared “uneducated”, if that makes any sense… it all seemed so childish and amateurish I couldn’t bring myself to make a profile and validate MySpace’s existence. I know, it sounds a little harsh, but I don’t take too kindly to my eyeballs being violated every time I had to visit MySpace.

Facebook on the other hand has a lot more structure and control, and that visually and logically appeals to me. The privacy controls are important to me, because I understand the risks of letting the public see my profile, both personally and professionally. In my mind, Facebook has a lot more ‘functionality’ in place that actually serves a purpose and isn’t just there to flaunt the latest style or widget that was hot at the time.

Back to social class on the internet. It makes sense to me why the demographics are lining up the way they are on those two social networking sites. There are several articles out on the internet that talk about that. The CNN article also mentions two other sites that attract even more affluent users: Twitter and LinkedIn.

LinkedIn makes sense; it’s a site for white-collar professionals who are seeking to build up their professional network.

Twitter is a bit more interesting… is it because only upper-class yuppies would be so self-centered to think that anyone really wants to ready the very minutia of their lives? Or because only they have that much free time on their hands to waste time twittering about life’s little foibles? :)

Here’s another example of a class divide between internet services. Gmail users tend to have a higher credit score than Yahoo users… the article notes that it might be because young users favor Yahoo email so that drives down the average credit score on that site.

I wonder what other cases might be out there… YouTube vs. Hulu? Flickr vs Picasa? Blogger vs. LiveJournal?