My Oh Myspace

For the first time since high school, I paged through the Facebook social predecessor, Myspace. At least personally, I had a Myspace long before I had a Facebook, and I was slow to make the switch. So in looking through Myspace again I was curious in some general trends.

First, I should start by saying I had no clue where to start. So I went to the homepage and clicked on one of the suggested profiles: Justin Beiber. This was my starting point and I linked through profiles from here.

Already there is a bias in my sample. My sample leaned female and likely in the younger age demographic. The average self-reported age was ~20 years old (I removed two outliers that reported obviously false ages of 87 and 51 from the average) though I am a little skeptical; I would guess that number to actually be lower. My sample was about 75% female. I found it striking how much easier it was to find female Myspace pages than male, and this was probably the variable that surprised me most. Again, I will attribute that to the bias of having started at the Justin Beiber page. Every user’s page I looked at had also logged in within the past month, over half having logged in within the passed week. I expected to run into a couple of dead or seldom updated pages, but that was not the case.

Another point that surprised me was how closed off content was. Unlike other students in this class, about 1/3 – ½ of the pages I visited had partially or fully blocked content. I also noticed that there were, on average, significantly less comments than compared to the average Facebook user’s wallposts. So, by my count, Myspace users go on slightly less frequently and also engage slightly less in a comment/wall-post capacity than Facebook users.

Thus my conclusions were that Myspace users are: teenage, female, and log onto the site about once a week. They are more protective of their content and get fewer comments than I had expected. So, voila.