i'm rich! duh i use facebook.

A recent 6 month research project conducted at UC Berkeley by PhD student Danah Boyd reveals that Facebook users are of a higher socioeconmic class than MySpace users. Boyd defines class not just by how much money someone makes, but also by their ambitions, how much education they have recieved, race, religion, and geographic location. Initially I was intrigued by such a sweeping generalization, but upon deeper analysis, I realized that Boyd is totally wrong in her findings. Not to say they are completely devoid of merit, but Danah's conclusions are forgetting one very important aspect of Facebook's history--it was started at Harvard in 2004 and remained a social network that only college students and alumni and highschoolers could be a part of until September 2006. MySpace; on the other hand, is a social network that has never discriminated against users who weren't associated with an educational institution (that's why when I was 18, 36 year old men were messaging me). So, the very history of both MySpace and Facebook accounts for this observed difference in class of people who use the online social networks. I am not sure why something so evident to me, a recent college graduate, escaped dear Danah Boyd.
She also claims that Facebook users are for the most part white and degree seeking, while the MySpace user demographic contains more latinos and hispanics and "the kids who are socially ostracised at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers." Again, these findings can be explained by who could join Facebook in the past as well as nationwide statistics on races and classes of people who attend college.
I use both MySpace and Facebook, and for different reasons. Facebook is what I use to talk to friends and when I am feeling a bit voyeuristic. MySpace is what I use when I want to check out new bands or friend a 45 year old.

mccain's myspace defaced

John McCain's MySpace page, fairly funny in and of itself, was slightly altered recently to exhibit McCain's new (and improved) stance on same-sex marriage. Unfortunately for gay people, people who want to marry their same-gendered best friend, and the general cause of civil rights and equality in America, McCain's new position was nothing more than a bit of internet connivery

McCain's MySpace template was created by Mike Davidson of Newsvine. As TechCrunch reports, "Davidson gave the template code away to anyone who wanted to use it, but asked that he be given credit when it was used, and told users to host their own image files." McCain's page uses the template without crediting Davidson and uses images hosted on Davidson's server, forcing Davidson to pay for bandwidth from the hits on McCain's page.

Thus, "Davidson decided to play a small prank on the campaign this morning as retribution. Since he’s in control of some of the images on the site, he replaced one that shows contact information" with a statement in support of gay marriage, "particularly marriage between passionate females" (above).

I like this act of internet vandalism. Not only is it a great way to point out the necessity of intellectual property rights protection on the internet, but it also makes a great political statement. Slob is hereby calling on any and all hackers to infiltrate the websites of conservative politicians and replace their right-wing bullshit with some lefter-wing bullfact.

via TechCrunch [via Newsvine]

nerds everywhere are waiting with bated breath

Rupert Murdoch's semi-recent acquisition, MySpace will receive a beating this month.

The bullies, two hackers that go by the names Mondo Armando and Mustaschio, announced on their LiveJournal that April 2007 will by the "Month of Myspace Bugs, Yuss!" (MOMBY, I swear...)

MOMBY follows in a string of Month of X Bugs and will consist of small bugs on your MySpace profile throughout the whole month.

You can avoid the bugs by adding mondo_armando@catholic.org to your spam blocker and http://momby.livejournal.com/ to your proxy blocker. You can also e-mail Mondo Armando suggestions for bugs. If there's something about MySpace that really irks you for some reason or other, let him know.

Don't worry emo kids, these hackers aren't harmful and April's not too long. Plus, I'm kind of excited to see what they have up their sleeves!

[via AHN]