Yesterday's Danah Boyd article has produced a lot of responses around the Internet, with plenty of blogger types turning out to be social butterflies with accounts on both Facebook and MySpace. So much for social science, I guess.
There was an interesting collision of articles in my RSS feed this morning, though, with Travis Hime offering an aesthetic comparison:
The second point in favor of Facebook is the fact that it doesn't make my eyes bleed when I read it. The visual layout is clean and simple, in direct contrast to the garish hideousness of MySpace, even before users take the opportunity to crowd their profiles with so many animated GIFs that they induce seizures. I invite you to go to just the front page of MySpace, where an advertisement for the Bratz movie has apparently been loaded into a shotgun and fired at the background.
As he notes, this is entirely consistent with the original thesis of the article, which holds that showy displays ("bling" as the kids say) are much more popular with the lower classes, while the upper classes go for the expensive and elegant Pottery Barn look.
Meanwhile Matthew Yglesias shares some thoughts on John Edwards's big house:
The basic reality is that Edwards is a rich man, and there's no hiding that -- big house or small house. Edwards' giant house, however, is not just expensive -- it's tacky. Its tackiness, however, perfectly reflects Edwards' working class roots and his whole "son of a millworker" narrative. I would never in a million years build a house like that no matter how much money I had, but that's because I'm a snob and nobody would ever vote for me.
I wonder which social networking site he prefers?
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The aesthetic issue is the primary reason I use my Facebook profile and shun MySpace unless absolutely necessary. Facebook is, to me, close to the ideal balance between user configurability, ease of use, and accessibility.