Front Office Box

Why the popularity of photos? Piskorski hypothesizes that people who post pictures of themselves can show they are having fun and are popular without having to boast.

Another draw of photos (and of SN sites in general) is that they enable a form of voyeurism. In real life there is a strong norm against prying into other people’s lives. But online enables “a very delicate way for me to pry into your life without really prying,” the researcher says. “Harvard undergrads do it all the time. They know all about each other before they meet face to face. ‘Oh, you’re that guy that did that internship in D.C. last summer.’ ”

Piskorski has also found deep gender differences in the use of sites. The biggest usage categories are men looking at women they don’t know, followed by men looking at women they do know. Women look at other women they know. Overall, women receive two-thirds of all page views.”

Twitter

Only the people who are willing to put themselves out there publicly in words to people who they may not know will use Twitter. Some people will find this incredibly appealing, others will find this too scary.”

But the remarkable finding was the gender dynamics. According to the research, there are more women on Twitter than men, women tweet about the same rate as men, but men’s tweets are followed by both sexes much more than expected by chance.