As everyone knows, there are two main social networks duking it out for online supremacy, Facebook and MySpace. I’ve always preferred Facebook’s uncluttered interface, and what I thought were its better networking and picture-sharing capabilities. Apparently my preference for Facebook says more about me than I originally anticipated;
"I have friends who are white," says 19-year-old Diego Luna. "They are my white people friends and they are mostly on Facebook. That's why I use Facebook. My brown people are on MySpace."
The class laughs nervously at his description, and then they agree. Benito Rodriguez, 16, adds, "Not to be racist or anything, but there's more white kids on Facebook."
Social media researcher Danah Boyd has heard a lot of conversations just like this. In her work for Microsoft she's spoken to teens all over the country about their use of social media. She thinks the online social world is dividing up, just like the real world.
The origins of the two sites explain the racial/cultural divide between them too. Facebook, developed at Harvard, was originally marketed to predominately white Ivy league schools to facilitate textbook trading. MySpace on the other hand, well, wasn’t.
