Exploring the behavior of social networking.
Results obtained
Conclusions and further study.
Surprisingly, contrary to our initial assumptions, the myspace.com network is much less of a web sprawling across all myspace.com users and is more a collection of seperated cliques. Also, the majority of users send only a few comments relative to receiving. It was rare to see a user send more than five comments to the same receiver.
As expected, without considering users who have obviously fictitious ages (greater than 100), the greatest age represented by our data is that of early to mid twenties. The gender differences appear quite evenly distributed.
The majority of user to user interaction appears to be of a flirtatious nature, which is an intersting statement about the nature of a semi-anonymous digital relationship. The amount of advertising being placed on myspace.com profiles, in the comment area is incredible as well. It seems that users are surprisingly willing to put up with being free advertisers in order to participate in what is claimed to be a free social network.
There are still many conclusions that can be made about social networking from watching the commenTree. The commenTree is still a work in progress and we are sure that with time, the commenTree can be used to study many more aspects of web based social networks.
Contact Information:
Kyle Gowen - kyle.gowen@gmail.com
Mengbo Li - mli1988@gmail.com
Mike Koyle - mikoyle@juno.com
Eric Rounds - ericroundsphoto@yahoo.com