Demographics of social network users - a case study on Plurk

In this research study, we present an empirical study on Plurk social network (http://www.plurk.com). Plurk´s unique features, such as public available user information, provide us a good opportunity to explored different user behaviors corresponding to different Plurk user groups based on their genders, ages, and nationalities. We crawled Plurk website and collected over hundred thousands of unique Plurk user pages in early 2011. These up-to-date sampled user data enable us to observe possible user behaviour on a social network. Basing on the user pages we collected, we characterize behaviours of Plurk user groups. In this paper we share what we found from this empirical case study. As far as we know, this study is first Plurk user study based on large Plurk user data randomly sampled from Plurk web site. While this study is to some extent primitive, we hope that the results of this study provide some insights and/or some references for comparison to researchers working on the topics about Internet social network user behaviours and related issues at different aspects.