I've run into many stats lately on women's use of facebook:
1. "Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, has talked about how women are not only the majority of its users, but drive 62% of activity in terms of messages, updates and comments, and 71% of the daily fan activity."
2. "Women aged 35-54 are the most active group in mobile socialization"
3. "Most women — 83% of respondents in this survey — are annoyed at one time or another by the posts from their Facebook connections."
So, I started talking to the women in my life about facebook. And I have a speculative theory - sorry that this is a theory based on gender and its kind of vague.. but facebook makes so much more sense to me when I look at it this way, and I find it an interesting discussion.
Basically, you have mother types and you have single women types. Single women are the early adopter social photo sharers - this is fun for them, and it strengthens reputation and attracts men. Meanwhile, mothers are off doing what they do - strengthening their family and social relationships through chat, gossip, hobbies, etc - it forms a safety net for their family.
Then there are men. Single men chase the single women. This forms a crowd. This crowd attracts married men / fathers and mothers alike (including people like me who are standing around saying 'wtf?'). Further, the crowd attracts social capitalists who leverage the crowd's attention to promote themselves, their business or their cause.
But, the average single female may have 2-7 years of her status as a single woman. Whereas the average mother will have her role for 18yrs+. So, you end up with this crowd mass, in the center is hookup activity. However, the majority of the crowd becomes family-centric and cause-centric security nets. And yea, when you look at this from a distance, its big and boring.
I totally agree that social interaction quality declines as group size increases - interactions will always approximate the lowest common denominator of a group over time.
However, I was not trying to imply or judge what is boring on facebook. Just trying to point out that the interaction activity around single women is more dynamic and less predictable than the interaction activity around mothers / families, and further that social security blankets are beginning to rule fb, by the numbers. Networks for the purpose of social security, by definition, are risk averse and less dynamic.
That being said, I'd love to see some analytics around unique page views of single women vs the rest of facebook users to see what facebook users on average consider interesting / boring.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/20/why-women-rule-the-internet... [2] http://mashable.com/2011/03/23/mobile-by-the-numbers-infogrp... [3] http://mashable.com/2011/03/30/women-facebook-survey/
So, I started talking to the women in my life about facebook. And I have a speculative theory - sorry that this is a theory based on gender and its kind of vague.. but facebook makes so much more sense to me when I look at it this way, and I find it an interesting discussion.
Basically, you have mother types and you have single women types. Single women are the early adopter social photo sharers - this is fun for them, and it strengthens reputation and attracts men. Meanwhile, mothers are off doing what they do - strengthening their family and social relationships through chat, gossip, hobbies, etc - it forms a safety net for their family.
Then there are men. Single men chase the single women. This forms a crowd. This crowd attracts married men / fathers and mothers alike (including people like me who are standing around saying 'wtf?'). Further, the crowd attracts social capitalists who leverage the crowd's attention to promote themselves, their business or their cause.
But, the average single female may have 2-7 years of her status as a single woman. Whereas the average mother will have her role for 18yrs+. So, you end up with this crowd mass, in the center is hookup activity. However, the majority of the crowd becomes family-centric and cause-centric security nets. And yea, when you look at this from a distance, its big and boring.