I was quite satisfied with the response so far and it has also really been useful to connect to other people that do similar work. Social network sites as well as geography have been some important topics here. It has been especially enlightening to listen to Mike Thelwall’s analysis of 15,000 MySpace profiles that did help me to qualify some of my findings (such as that girls make better friends and older users have less friends). There are some other insights in his paper so you should check it out on Mike’s website.

There has been quite some interest in this kind of research and I just wanted to highlight a couple of really useful tools for analysis of MySpace and other network sites. First of all, for MySpace I am helping to develop a Perl module (WWW::Myspace) that actually acts as an API that interfaces with MySpace (via screen scraping) to provide access to the (public!) data on people’s profiles. It is now working rather well and can give you friends, comments, location information etc. If you want to give it a quick look, check my simple WWW::Myspace trial.

If you are not familiar to programming, you might want to have a look at dapper.net. It lets you select the sections of a web page that are relevant to you, extracts data and exports it into a format of your choice. I haven’t used it myself so far but it seems really useful.

If you have any comments or question, please leave a comment on this blog or send me an email!