Boyd Reading

• What information/lessons should libraries take away from the Boyd reading

The Boyd readings provide great insight to the user population of both facebook and myspace. Boyd attributes many of the differences in user population to social status. Boyd's observations show that many individuals from lower socioeconomic class prefer myspace over facebook. However, Boyd does not reference "socio-economic class" as a division in income, but rather adopts sociologists, Nalani Kotamraju's argument that "class divisions in the United States has more to do with lifestyle and social stratification than income. " This concept in itself is quite interesting, providing a new perspective of the term which may have implications for the library world. Perhaps the differences in social class which traditionally affect the access to information could be researched from this perspective. Rather than attributing these differences to income, the differences in lifestyle and social stratification could be studied further.

There are many differences among the two social networking platforms, and it is my opinion that individuals choose one service over another due to the structure, features, and niche market that it may serve. Boyd discusses the emergence of various social networking sites such as six degrees, friendster, Orkut, myspace and facebook among others. It seems that members tend to migrate from one service to another based on performance, cost, accessibility and flexibility. Boyd's readings nicely highlights many of these differences which could prove to be very useful to the librarian looking to reach the teenage population. Librarians should also take note of how quickly one SNS can rise in popularity and should stayed informed of the newest SNS hits.