As has been discussed here before, socnets are becoming an increasingly important part of political campaigns online outreach. To date, I have not seen any study or statistics regarding the political makeup of either MySpace or Facebook.
But I did catch this interesting article at FreeRepublic.com, "Class War: MySpace vs. Facebook." If the trend examined in the article is true, advertisers, along with campaigns, may well need to adjust their online strategy. Of course, this so-called "trend" could be nothing more than the flavor of the week.
As an online activist with profiles at both sites, I do have to say I'm beginning to prefer Facebook, mainly due to it's flexibility and innovative spirit. Some of the new political "applications" on Facebook are especially promising. More on that soon.
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I prefer Facebook, too
I do like Facebook over MySpace. It just seems ready made for political networking and organizing.
Facebook vs Myspace
Personally, I think it makes a huge amount of sense that "rich kids" are leaving Myspace. Figure that when Facebook started, it was Ivy League. Then it opened it up to hundreds of colleges. Then it when it was opened up to everyone else...
Who is more likely to already have dozens - if not hundreds - of friends on Facebook? One of the common attributes of an affluent family are parents that encourage them to work hard and the students take advanced classes...
Facebook's Elitism
You still see the legacy of this early elitism if you check out a group membership list (before they yanked it the other day). People from Ivy League colleges are listed on top, other elite schools (like Georgetown) are not far behind, followed by other colleges (usually categorized by state), and then high schoolers.
Also, check out the ID number attached to your profile URLs. Low numbers are reserved for Ivy League and elite schools, even if someone joined Facebook relatively late in the game.
Facebook id's
Alright, so you got me interested and I spent the morning digging. After looking at numerous friends - and some of their friends and even some friends that have multiple accounts through different schools - it looks like the id is made up of two pieces.
First, there's a school identifier prefix. For my alma mater - Rose Hulman - this is 2920. It looks like the user gets this as a result of the first email address they use. This number is assigned in the order the school was added... aka how a database works.
Second, there's the student suffix. From my wanderings, this seems to be a 4 digit number which is a simple counter on the student... aka how a database works.
This combo seemed odd at first since lots of schools have 10k+ students so after deeper digging I found that they seem to add additional school prefixes... not sure if there's a pattern or just coincidence, but UIUC uses 192, 193, 194 and probably a few others. I suspect the technical reason for this is for data sharding.
So I think the "bias" you see is just the representation of their grouping scheme. If you happened to join school X first, you'd have X0001 regardless if X was #1 (Harvard) or #2920 (Rose-Hulman)... I think this instance of "bias" is a windmill based on not understanding on how databases work.
what the fuck are you on
what the fuck are you on about? how can you have an elitist website?!?!?! I think you boys have been reading too much George Orwell with your cheese at bedtimes.
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