There are lots of media articles about dangers
of Facebook, MySpace, Insert your favourite social network service. The New York Times is a good source, as is the BBC. There is relatively little hard research, either on the number of people using social network services, the demographics (age group, sex) or on how they are used.
There is one researcher actively working on social networks, and that is danah boyd (sic) variously of the University of California-Berkeley and Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. Intern at Google. Not an academic lightweight then.
danah's research breaks down into a number of areas
Overviews of social network services, including contributions to BT and Vodafone. These are short summaries for a general business or technical audience
Identity management in social networks, including the requirements for identity management, and the technical issues of various identity management models. This is particularly important to telcos given the recent announcements from the OpenID Foundation.
How social networks are actually used - the anthropology of social networks - based on interviews and an analysis of 10000 profiles. Has some interesting insights about the differences between MySpace and Facebook in the USA.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project and Harris Interactive are also actively publishing research on the use of internet communications.
There is a huge age bias in the current use of social network sites. There are some interesting implications for the providers of social networks, which for example some telcos are looking to become. The importance of an identity management model and the supporting technology is key. The requirements are more complex that they appear to be at first, since one technical issue is how to provide multiple identities or identity personas?
One of the questions I have been trying to work out for a while is why does it seem that the majority of users of social network services like Facebook and MySpace are under 25? The only exception seems to be LinkedIn, whose users are mostly in the technology industry. I'd heard the idea of digital natives (people who grew up with digital technology) but didn't know how important it was.
So, I have taken the UK national population statistics, which describe the number of people in each age group. For each age group I then estimated the percentage of the group that had access to digital technology when they were growing up. It is an increasing percentage over time, starting in the late 1970s. There were computers in schools in the late 1970s: I was very lucky because my school had one. They were exceptionally few and far between (ours was made by the inspired head of physics, Tony Compton). With the introduction of 'affordable' PCs such as the Apple II / PET / BBC Micro / IBM PC, there was an increase in the numbers of computers in schools in the early 1980s, with a further increase in the late 1980s, until UK government policy mandated computers in schools in the 1990s. Now we have computer suites in most schools, and children from from all but deprived backgrounds have access to a computer at home. The result is this graph.
Suddenly the split between the population under 24 and over 24 becomes very clear, and more importantly, we can see how it is derived from ICT in education and at home.
Conclusion
There are massive implications for all employers in general. Facility with communications is the defining characteristic, and this is likely to change the way in which we do business. The employers on Wall Street who have been banning access to Facebook, probably need to think again, because it may just replace the corporate email system.
Notes
