MySpace Study

Results from a study by Mike Thelwall of the School of Computing and Information Technology at the University of Wolverhampton (UK), entitled "Social Networks, Gender and Friending: an analysis of MySpace Member Profiles" were published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology June 2008.

With two small samples of 15,043 and 7,627 member profiles, Thelwall was able to extract data to give a representative idea of the makeup of MySpace users. To summarise, Thelwall found that:

• the median representative age is 21 (only representative because it is based on what the profiles say their age is)
• women tend to be looking for friendship, men for dating
• females and younger users have more MySpace friends
• approximately 60% of MySpace accounts are inactive
• many users only had the obligatory Tom as their friend

This study gives an insight into our users, both actual and potential and for those libraries who opt to inhabit MySpace, gives useful information to help best focus their virtual services.

Michelle