MySpace vs. Friendster

I decided to share the paper I wrote, along with assistance from Pete Ramsey, Megan Hendershot, and Ellen Whisler, in spring 2006. Some of the scatter charts got lost in translation through Google docs, but it's mostly quite readable. The link to the paper is here. I still like the title:
"MySpace vs. Friendster: Loving the Graffiti Park, Leaving the Police State" (with props to danah boyd).

I may take up Lorraine's suggestion to repeat the research and try to publish it as a more longitudinal study.

Here's the Abstract:

The age of online social networking has arrived, but what are the implications? Is this a clearly youth-driven phenomenon, used primarily for dating and making new friends? How much are the people using such sites revealing about themselves? Has the blogosphere intersected with social networks or do they represent separate realms in cyberspace? In examining two of the most popular and well-known social network sites, MySpace¹ and Friendster², this study hopes to answer these and other questions. Furthermore, it aims to elucidate the underlying reasons for why MySpace has clearly overtaken Friendster as the more popular choice, based on its phenomenal and unprecedented growth over the past few years. By creating a random number sample of 140 user IDs on each site, we analyze the profiles of these users and show that, indeed, young people heavily dominate these social networks; most users have few friends and reveal modest amounts of information about themselves; the sites are used for more than just dating and relationships; blogging does not play a major role; and MySpace is vastly more popular among Americans than Friendster, which appears to be the favored choice of southeast Asian youth.