BusinessWeek reporter Jon Fine in his blog Fine On Media has published an excerpt from an interview with veteran journalist Michael Wolff in which Wolff says MySpace will go the way of AOL, adding: “…if you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people.”

Cue Michael Arrington at TechCrunch leaping to the defense of MySpace users in the US, picking apart Wolff’s diatribe point-for-point, with stats that show exactly how monied and tech-savvy MySpace users really are.

Eric Eldon at VentureBeat makes a few astute points in response: “I think Facebook’s success is more nuanced than either Wolff — or Fine — imagine. People want to use the web to share information about things they care about, especially (for whatever reason) wealthier, better-educated people. Facebook does a better job of helping people to do this.”

“Facebook’s success isn’t just about class, it’s about why and how people use the site, regardless of class. The correlation with class, though, is seemingly that wealthier, better educated types are drawn to sharing information rather than self-expression. And that is why micro-messaging service Twitter may be doing so well with typically well-off, well-educated tech early adopters.”

Meanwhile over at paidContent, Rafat Ali posts briefly about MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe’s cautious optimism when it comes to growing ad revenues in 2009, adding that DeWolfe said the company “sees opportunities to buy start-ups for a fraction of what they were asking even six months ago. And tons of them are knocking on MySpace’s door these days, he said. DeWolfe said acquisitions are key and areas would include international markets, building its music offering and developing applications for mobiles.”

SixApart buys Pownce
As seems to be usual these days, when news breaks, Twitter is where you hear it first. Thus it was that a trending topic on Twitter is SixApart’s acquisition of Pownce, the other microblogging site that no-one ever really used (which is why the news has been met with a collectively rather underwhelmed ‘meh’ from the industry). As Adam Ostrow tweeted: “glad I didn’t invest much time in Pownce”.

Leah Culver, Pownce co-founder, made the announcement on the Pownce blog, saying: “We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009. We love the Pownce community and we will miss you all.”

Mike Malone joins Culver in the move to SixApart, while Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka will become advisers to the company.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb thinks the move is likely to bring some interesting new innovations down the line: “SixApart is a great home for Pownce co-founders Leah Culver and Mike Malone, it’s a big company with a lot of support for open standards and innovation – something that Pownce was known for as much as anything. … Pownce made frequent appearances wherever a new API was announced and the team behind it is sure to come up with some exciting technology at their new home.”

All bets off with the launch of the Nokia N97
On the subject of exciting technology, all the web’s aflutter today with first impressions of the Nokia N97, launched in Barcelona at Nokia World 2008.

paidContent whetted some appetites prior to the launch: “Based on early information Nokia provided to the press before the announcement, the phone looks like an HTC Tilt, but behaves like the T-Mobile G1, and easily beats both the iPhone and G1 when it comes to a number of features and specifications, like the 5 megapixel camera, video-recording capabilities and support for Adobe’s Flash.”

Scoble calls it the ultimate Facebook device and has posted a detailed look at just how much of an iPhone slayer this new beauty is, as well two videos of the phone in action.

Here’s Nokia’s video illustrating the shiny new must-have. Pity it’s only expected out in the first half of next year.