A Bit More Detail

Unpublished research by Eszter Hargittai of Northwestern University in Chicago found big differences between American users of Facebook and users of MySpace.

"Existing social divisions translate online," said the associate professor in the communications studies department. "These sites are mainly used for hanging out with people you already know."

Hargittai's research found a difference by race, ethnicity and parental education in the U.S. Hispanic students, for example, are more likely to use MySpace because that's where "their friends hang out."

Facebook users were more likely to have grown up in a household where parents had graduate degrees, she found.

Class divisions exist between those who use Facebook versus MySpace, with the former attracting a better educated clientele, at least in the U.S., new research suggests.

In Canada, Facebook is the hands-down dominant social media web tool, and it's not because everyone in Canada is better educated than their U.S. counterparts.

"We are a Facebook country," said Rhonda McEwen, who teaches in the faculty of information studies at the University of Toronto and specializes in new media and the information practices of young people.

Facebook users in Canada include everyone from teens to grandparents, she said.

"The younger teens here don't know MySpace. They don't even recognize the term, which is really surprising to me, given how big it is in the United States."

Facebook is leaping ahead of MySpace to turn into the most popular social networking site in the U.S. Yet although Facebook nailed down 58.6 percent of all U.S visits to social networking sites in September -- for an increase of 194 percent -- use of Twitter surged even more astoundingly, according to Experian Hitwise.

Only a year ago, MySpace held a commanding lead of 66.8 percent among the 155 social networking sites studied. But since then, U.S. users' visits to MySpace have plummeted by 55 percent to a total of just 30.2 percent, leaving Facebook the new winner in the social networking sweepstakes, say statistics released by the number cruncher last week.

Most people I went to college with had Facebook accounts before MySpace, since I went to one of the earliest schools whose students and alumni were invited to Facebook. But MySpace soon became a much more popular site, and anyone could join. So lots of my other friends quickly signed up. Many of them, including myself, have since left the site, but remain active on Facebook. So what's going on?

I almost equate it with the Microsoft-Yahoo/Apple-Google disparity. Products from the former grouping generally gave its users more power over the interface and had an early mover advantage, so they dominated initially. But since then, consumers have shifted to prefer the simpler, more elegant interface in the Apple-Google style.

For example, one of the reasons I left MySpace was because I would receive entirely too many sketchy friend or band requests that did not interest me. A few times I clicked on pages and narrowly escaped getting infected with malware/viruses. Even though I had a lot more control over customizing my MySpace page, I began not to care. Some people's pages were also too customized -- it became annoying. I came to prefer Facebook's simplicity and functionality. I made a similar shift from Yahoo to Google, though I have not weaned myself off Yahoo services entirely, since its offerings are broader than Google's.