When Facebook first started becoming really popular (as in, internationally) I was very pro-Myspace exactly because of its "ghetto"-ness (not in the racial sense, but in terms of atmosphere). Facebook was dull and sterile, whereas MySpace had music, you could look at profiles of people who hadn't friended you, you could put crazy layouts on your profile, and.. well.. MySpace was just 101x more interesting.
Thing is, it's still true. Facebook is dull and sterile, MySpace is still fertile and full of musicians.. and yet now I'm on Facebook and never use MySpace. Go figure!
Everyone thinks it's cool to live in a neighborhood where your neighbors blast hip-hop all hours of day and night until they have to sleep. Everyone thinks MySpace is cool until your browser crashes or slows down, or you strain your eyes reading yellow on orange, or you hear the first 3 seconds of some crappy hip hop song that clashes with what you already have playing on iTunes.
Sadly, Facebook isn't dull and sterile anymore. I can't spend a minute there without someone asking me to join their mafia or pushing some dumb "which care bear are you" quiz on me when I just want to chill out and exchange messages with my friends and comment on my fruit smoothie this morning.
" Everyone thinks MySpace is cool until your browser crashes or slows down, or you strain your eyes reading yellow on orange, or you hear the first 3 seconds of some crappy hip hop song that clashes with what you already have playing on iTunes."
So you are saying that black MySpace users tend to have a bad taste in colors and music, and therefore the white users leave? Whereas surely white users only create tasteful profiles?
Or maybe MySpace in general sucks, and therefore people are leaving irrespective of race.
One thing though: MySpace seems to be the standard site for music and bands, so perhaps "races" who are more preoccupied with music would tend to hang out there more.
MySpace sucks because it gives users far more control than they ought to have over their pages.
Facebook maintains high quality and a coherent feel by realizing that most people couldn't design their way out of a paper bag, and only giving users very basic, high-level control over their page.
IMO, everything flows from that. MySpace feels like Geocities: total amateur hour. Even if you had the exact same group of people (and I do agree there are demographic differences between MySpace and FB, I just don't think they're that relevant), Facebook would still be easier and more pleasant to use.
I thought it was a given that MySpace is the epitome of ugliness. So my point was, maybe the "migration" has just the superficial reasons of ugliness and suckiness, not the huge society-psychobabble reasons.
Sadly, Facebook isn't dull and sterile anymore. I can't spend a minute there without someone asking me to join their mafia or pushing some dumb "which care bear are you" quiz on me
To be fair, that's mostly dependent on the sort of company you keep, and you can turn off the notifications for all that sort of stuff anyway - it makes FB actually usable :)
I know, I just thought it was a lot better before it became a platform for third party apps, and when it had built in features that were useful to the college student core community (like registering which classes you had and searching for other students in your section).
I hear the argument about browsers blowing up on MySpace all over the interwebs, but it really depends on the company you keep, to some degree. In other words, they give people freedom and some pages are horrendous, but some people's profiles are interesting and really well designed.
Thing is, it's still true. Facebook is dull and sterile, MySpace is still fertile and full of musicians.. and yet now I'm on Facebook and never use MySpace. Go figure!