Rapleaf Research Into Social Networks Not Particularly Revealing

Email today from Rapleaf shows some tepid insights based on looking at 49.3 million people in their dataset:

[via email]

In a follow up to the Study of Social Network Users vs. Age, we just released full downloadable data on the 49.3 million people from the previous study.

Highlights:

• Women ages 14-24 dominate activity on social networks and have more friends than men of the same ages.
• Men ages 35+ are more active and have more friends than women of the same ages.
• The average social network user has 2-25 friends.
• There are a disproportionately high number of 69 year olds across various social networks.

Full data can be found here:

http://business.rapleaf.com/company_press_2008_07_29.html

Please let me know if there are any questions about the full dataset.

Best,

Vivek Sodera

Rapleaf

I would much rather have seen some distribution graphs, and pivot tables, like numbers of social contacts v countries or age groups. Instead we get the dataset to roll our own, and the observation that people put down 69 as an age when they have to have an age (and one older that 18) to participate. Yawn.

I went back and looked at the earlier Study of Social Network Users vs. Age which is exactly what it says: a few highlights based on the distribution of age on various social networks. I am still interested in cultural difference, like French-speaking people v German speaking people's affiliation patterns, and so on.

Comments

[LJ Jones]

Maybe you would find what we are doing with this type of data a little more interesting. We take the social network data and overlay demographic data to give a complete profile. This allows us to relate social network activity to a variety of demographic data. We are about to release a report on social network breakdown by political party. Please email if you would be interested in the report.