It's always interesting to look at the demographics for any large website, to gain some insight into the type of people generally attracted to it.  For example, WinCustomize primarily attracts tech enthusiasts and digital artists, mostly in the 30-50 age bracket.  But what about economic divides?  Careers?  Educational background?  The deeper you go, the more accurate a picture you start to paint of a web community.  What's interesting is that as social networks continue to take hold, is how they tend to organize themselves along the same sort of social dividing lines we see in the real world.  In theory, the Internet is the great equalizer where it doesn't matter who you are, or what you do in real life, it all depends on how you present yourself.  But as researchers turn to this new field of study in earnest, they find that people continue to voluntarily segregate themselves, be it consciously or subconsciously.

UC Berkeley PhD student Danah Boyd, wrote a "blog essay" on the subject of American class divisions as seen through Facebook and MySpace, the top two social networking sites out there.  Boyd looks at the two networks from both a historical perspective, talking about populations when the sites launched, and then at how they shifted over time.  The result is that today, Facebook is the social networking site for college students, and the sort of people to have white collar jobs and tastes, and MySpace is mostly dominated by high school students, people on the outskirts of society, and more blue-collar styled folks.

It's not an academic study, more a collection of observations from other research and interviews.  Nonetheless, it's an extremely interesting essay that gives a unique view into the social networking phenomenon and how regular real-world social limits are applying themselves online.