Age differences in online social networking

Abstract

This study presents an analysis of age-related \ndifferences of user behavior in the social network site \nMySpace.com. We focus on two age groups: older \npeople (60+ years of age) and teenagers (between 13 \nand 19 years of age). We used locally developed web \ncrawlers to collect large sets of data from MySpace’s \nuser profile pages. We used different analytic \ntechniques to quantify any differences that exist in the \nnetworks of MySpace friends of older people and \nteenagers. Content analysis was applied to investigate \nage-related differences concerning the way users \nrepresent themselves on their profile pages. Our \nfindings show that teenagers tend to have much larger \nnetworks of friends compared to older users. Also, we \nfound that the majority of teenage users’ MySpace \nfriends are in their own age range (age +/- 2 years), \nwhilst older people’s friends tend to have a more \ndiverse age distribution.