My New Technology course versions 2011 finished in beginning April. Students turned in some 70 papers so I spent much of April reading about technology. As usual, I will publish some of the more interesting ones here on my site.
First one is a really interesting research done by Brynjar Örn Jensson. He did research in to how people use social networks. Some interesting findings are that most most people abandoned MySpace when they open a Facebook account. It seems that Facebook killed MySpace. Another interesting result is that over 70% of the participants use Facebook for communication with family and friends, while some 10% use the site to kill time.
Most people, almost 60% spend less than 3 hours a day on social networking while some 10% are online all day.
The abstract:
This paper covers the largest social networking sites available today. Facebook is currently the largest site. Twitter is growing fast and these two sites are the options that people choose when it comes to communicating and socialising online. MySpace is a social network that has completely crashed in popularity and has lost all of its former characteristics due to the downfall in their user base. They have decided to concentrate on promoting unknown music talents.
The survey that was carried out underlines Facebook ́s dominance and suggests that Twitter is a force to be reckoned with. The survey explaines why Facebook completely shattered MySpace when it comes to popularity and number of active users.
Facebook and Twitter are put head to head and their pros and cons are examined. Although Facebook dominates in number of users, Twitter definitely has some factors over and above Facebook.
Paper can be found here: Social Networks: Survival of the fittest