Comments on: How many Americans use social networking sites?

By: fred

fred — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 20:48:00 +0000

@kin

Yes - Pew is seriously amazing, an invaluable resource. And they're remarkably nice, too!

@david

No problem, and I agree. For Pew's previous studies, they've read lists of what a SNS is, etc. The ambiguity itself creates methodological issues. For the US, that seems like a good way to go about the question, but you don't know who is active, and it might leave out sites like LinkedIn that *feel* rather different from these youth-oriented SNS (though I would argue there is likely significant overlap between populations, though likely not within margin of error).

Thanks for the link to that study, I've bookmakred!

By: David Brake

David Brake — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 11:59:00 +0000

Thanks for picking that up – I overlooked that study as it wasn’t primarily SNS focused. Two notes – the survey was conducted in late December 07 – even more recently than I thought. And the question asked was “do you ever use online social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook” – this might overstate things a bit as people might answer yes if they had used one of these and had stopped.

There are some fairly recent stats from a commercial organization about UK adoption of various SNSes – chiefly about facebook – available here FYI:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/513941/The-Facebook-Faceoff-An-Empirical-Analysis-by-Human-Capital

By: Kin Lane

Kin Lane — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 07:44:00 +0000

Great Stats on Social Networking...thanks for digging up and sharing.

Isn't The Pew Internet and American Life Project great?

They have provided some very valuable studies about ourselves and the Internet.

Curious what these numbers will do in 2008. I predict historic growth.