It's absolutely classist. I saw the research when it came out and found it quite interesting.
Thing is, class divisions are a fact of life. If your goal is to pursue a more just society, it's worth trying to minimize them (though even then, you need to acknowledge them before you can do anything productive). But if your goal is to get maximal user uptake for your new social network, it's worth exploiting them. They aren't going away, and if you don't, someone else will.
A lot of Web startups have actually had the byproduct of significantly lowering class divisions, eg. Google gives important information to people who would not otherwise have had it, Twitter lets people organize who would otherwise have been divided & conquered by oppressive regimes. But to get there, they need users, and one powerful way to get users is to be seen as a status symbol that makes one cooler than their peers.
Regardless of whether exploiting class divisions makes good sense for increasing product adoption, I'll reiterate that it was not class divisions that killed MySpace but bad product divisions.
MySpace's ad deal with Google encouraged a site design that was anti-user. Facebook developed their own ad platform that allowed them to extract value from data that only Facebook has and that third-party networks couldn't get value from because it's so specific (like where you went to university).
But as much as the movies would have you believe Facebook won on "coolness", it won on old-fashioned better product decisions.
Thing is, class divisions are a fact of life. If your goal is to pursue a more just society, it's worth trying to minimize them (though even then, you need to acknowledge them before you can do anything productive). But if your goal is to get maximal user uptake for your new social network, it's worth exploiting them. They aren't going away, and if you don't, someone else will.
A lot of Web startups have actually had the byproduct of significantly lowering class divisions, eg. Google gives important information to people who would not otherwise have had it, Twitter lets people organize who would otherwise have been divided & conquered by oppressive regimes. But to get there, they need users, and one powerful way to get users is to be seen as a status symbol that makes one cooler than their peers.