[ExI] The entropy of Extropy-Chat

[BillK]

On 3/2/10, Jeffery P. Davis wrote:
<snip>
> Facebook is frequented by a more affluent audience that fled from Myspace
> when the former became open-registration.  Myspace is now primarily
> frequented by black urban youth and poor whites.  You might even argue
> the Myspace exodus was a form of white flight as the medium
>  became more popular with black youth.  Vast simplification, but that's
> basically how the cards fall.
> You see a lot of upper middle-class folks on Facebook of the kind you almost
> never found on myspace.
>
>

Well, yes, maybe, but.......
You have to be very careful with social analysis. It really is very
mixed-up, nothing is black or white (to coin a phrase).

Myspace was first and everybody flocked to the latest social gimmick,
because all their friends went there.
Then Facebook appeared with different features and some people tried
it out. Traffic boomed and Facebook traffic passed Myspace a year or
two ago. But people don't delete their Myspace accounts, (just in
case), and still check them occasionally. People actively use the
social system that their friends use, so momentum is moving more and
more people to Facebook.

This report from Oct 2009, says
<http://mashable.com/2009/10/12/myspace-traffic-plummets/>

MySpace’s U.S. Traffic Falls Off a Cliff
Despite some recent innovations by the former king of social
networking (as well as a CEO replacement), it looks like the MySpace
exodus is rapidly accelerating. Can MySpace’s freefall be stopped?
Numbers released by web analytics firm Compete.com paint a terribly
bleak picture for the future of MySpace (MySpace). According to the
Compete numbers, MySpace’s U.S. traffic dropped from 55.6 million
unique visitors in August to 50.2 million in September. It has nearly
shed off 20% of its U.S. traffic since June.
-------------------------

So it looks like Myspace is dying and *everyone* is moving to Facebook.

To turn a mass changeover like this into 'white flight' seems a bit
misleading to me. It will become more obvious over time whether the
split into two groups is correct, or whether it was just a temporary
snapshot in time during a wholesale move.

BillK