Different people use different social networking sites. I don’t use any, the middle-aged (with many exceptions) seem to use Facebook, teenagers seem to use MySpace and Bebo (1/3 of public Bebo profiles belong to people aged between 13 and 17!).
Even though I rarely use social networking sites, I hear day in and day out about them. From what I’ve heard, I have made several judgements about the websites (even though I’ve never used them!).
Facebook users seem to see themselves as ‘better’ than MySpace users, generally being older (ironic considering Facebook’s student origins) than them and realising how annoying auto-playing media is!
MySpace users seem to have ‘oooh look animations follow my mouse’ (courtesy of our good Web 1.0 friend DHTML) and ‘look how pretty my profile is but don’t look at the content… especially spelling!’ attitude. The general bloat MySpace forces users to endure with its advertising and default layout in addition to the bloat users elect to add themselves reminds me very much of Geocities or Angelfire back in the day.
A big problem I have with MySpace is the fact that when you’re trying to design a profile page you seem to spend 75% of your time inventing work-arounds and only 25% of your time designing.
Bebo users seem to be even less self-respecting than MySpace users using even more appalling spelling (here’s a typical comment: ‘hu r yuu n y did yuu add meh..x0x’), BLOCK CAPITALS and terribly designed profiles whenever possible. I had a quick browse through some Bebo public profiles whilst writing this post and I was impressed to find no auto-starting media (they probably block Flash! I’m sure that their target audience would love auto-starting media!).
Feel free to say your own assumptions, opinions or rebuttals to any of my points in the comments 
Tags: bebo, facebook, myspace, myspace sucks, social networking, web 2, web 2.0, web2, web2.0
You also forgot national based demographics - different nations cluster (in general) to different social networking sites (much like they do with IM)
[...] wrote an interesting post today on The Personality of Social NetworkingHere’s a quick [...]
I sort of agree with your assessment of the profiles though theres a lot of students/ recent grads on facebook too.
Plaxo started as a contact lister like LinkedIn but now has portal aggregation similar to Facebook for the business dudes.
Many folk I know in office type work seem to also use LinkedIn as a way to keep contacts up to date without doing much typing.
by the way, when I uploadedd the above comment I got a page of runtime diagnotics from your server…
Rashbre: Thanks, fixed.
my mainstays are stumbleupon, facebook and twitter. i tried to use myspace for a while but just can’t bring myself to stay on there, mainly for the reasons you mention. it IS not a bad source of traffic, though.
stumbleupon and twitter were made for me
i’m on facebook because it’s a fabulous networking tool. however, as an application it’s clumsy, nosey, confusing and intrusive. not to mention the visual appeal, which always makes me think of college washrooms.