Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC described LinkedIn as ‘Facebook for losers’, which got me thinking about the reputations which social networking sites have.

I also considered LinkedIn as the social networking website for professionals, not ‘losers’, and I must agree with an astute commenter, Jim_Panzie, on the BBC blog:

LinkedIn is a great way to keep up with Professional contacts, Facebook and Myspace just didn’t work for me they seemed to be for kids

Perhaps LinkedIn is for people who ‘want to put their CV out’, but even that is a form of networking (just perhaps not as social as Facebook etc).

Facebook used to seem relatively sophisticated when compared to MySpace, and it struck me as attracting an elder and better educated audience. TechCrunch ventured to even claim that choosing between the two was simply an IQ test!

TechCrunch, in 2007, stated that the introduction of widgets into Facebook was a fantastic idea but it has lowered the tone of the network. An increasing amount of young people consequently started to use Facebook and it made the site lose some of its social element and made it more into a playground.

MySpace and Bebo generally stir up images of a bunch of teenagers with distasteful backgrounds and music.

I steer clear of major social networking sites; they’re more hassle than they’re worth and make us unproductive.

Different ages, and classes, use different social networks. Class divides, even online.

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