I was wondering, when looking across the various social networks that I’m a part of, what if anything can be extrapolated from the friend counts in each. In real life I have a given set of friends, and subsets of them and I are members of various networks under which we are labeled friends. My friend counts go like this across both social networks and sites with a social networking component:<\/p>\n
MySpace: 90<\/strong> (includes many people I don’t know) UPDATE:<\/strong>Dodgeball: 20<\/strong>, Last.fm: 2<\/strong>, MyBlogLog: 2<\/strong><\/p>\n Orkut almost doesn’t count because it’s largely abandoned (in the US), but I did sign up for it back in the day. Looking across all of the networks, it’s clear I have different sets of friends in each. I imagine that speaks, to some extent, as to which of my friends are the most nerdy. Fil<\/a> is clearly tops in that list. He appears in 11 of 12 networks (no Netflix). Then there are people like Martha who appear in some of my least-populous networks (Netflix, Upcoming.org) but not the more popular (Facebook).<\/p>\n If I were to trim MySpace down to people I actually know, I think it would dip below LinkedIn on the list. Perhaps that speaks to my age? I keep in touch with more people in a professional context than social? As for some of the lower links (single digit ones) I think that’s largely explained by the lack of value those sites provide with their social components. Amazon is missing a huge opportunity, as their social components have languished for years, and they could do a lot of great things with them. Upcoming.org is another great opportunity that seems to be fading. Netflix is an exception – they do a nice job, but there just aren’t as many people I know with a Netflix account.<\/p>\n I have an order of magnitude fewer friends on YouTube as opposed to Flickr, which I don’t think is fully explained by the fact that photos are more popular than videos. I think a lot of it has to do with YouTube’s terrible user experience when it comes to inviting and sharing with friends. I still can’t see some of my friends’ videos, and I have no idea why.<\/p>\n From a strict social networking perspective, I like Facebook’s structure the best, but I have relatively few friends there. I think that largely speaks to my age. Facebook grew popular in colleges a few years after I left, and only a subset of people I know went back and joined it as alumni.<\/p>\n
\nLinkedIn: 74<\/strong>
\nFlickr: 70<\/strong> (friends+family)
\nFriendster: 41<\/strong>
\nFacebook: 29<\/strong>
\nAmazon: 7<\/strong>
\nYouTube: 5<\/strong>
\nDel.icio.us: 4<\/strong>
\nUpcoming.org: 4<\/strong>
\nDigg: 3<\/strong>
\nNetflix: 3<\/strong>
\nOrkut: 3<\/strong><\/p>\n