Measurement and gender-specific analysis of user publishing characteristics on MySpace

Online social networks have become popular platforms for people to make connections, share information, and interact with each other. In an online social network, user publishing activities such as sending messages and posting photos represent online interactions between friends that involve the use of network and system resources. As more and more businesses use online social networks as a means to promote their ´brand names´, a good understanding of user publishing characteristics is important not only for capacity planning (server scaling estimation, network bandwidth provisioning, and performance tuning), but also for marketing analysis and security measures of online social networks. Recently there have been many efforts to measure and analyze various characteristics of online social networks. Most of these studies have focused on the network graph properties such as node degree distribution, clustering coefficient, and connected components. In this work, we measure and analyze the gender-specific user publishing characteristics on MySpace. Our results show that there are recognizable patterns with respect to profile attributes, user interactions, temporal usages, and blog contents for users of different genders. In particular, gender neutral profiles (most of them are music bands, TV shows, and other commercial sites) differ significantly from normal male and female profiles for several publishing patterns.