I also think that geographical location is also an important factor, again no hard data, but in the UK at least there appears to be a age bias to which SNS that you use. When I researched www.bebo.com, a 19 year old first year university student at LSE made some very interesting observations, both her parents were school teachers, but she did not consider herself middle class, she found FB elitist, along with most of the students at LSE, but used www.bebo.com to connect with her friends from her home town that did not go to university. FB certainly appears to be the out right winner for university students and recently on Capital Radio (largest popular music radio station in London) did a simple internet / text in poll on what their listeners were using, FB won. Having been on FB for over two years now (you had to have a university email address to sign up when I joined), I have noticed that a lot of friends and ex work colleagues are opening FB accounts. Martin On 6/21/07, William Bain <willronb@yahoo.com> wrote:
Barry Wellman wrote: "It is path dependency. If most of your friends are on FB or MS, then you will choose that one. I haven't seen hard data on socioeconomic differences, and I'd be reluctant to generalize that FB is mid-class and MS working-class."
-- Martin Garthwaite PhD candidate, London Knowledge Lab www.lkl.ac.uk +447957 764819 Skype id mgarthwaite1330 MS IM marting@gmail.com