It's all 'about you': Diversity in online profiles

Abstract

User profiles on today's social networking sites support only a small set of predefined questions. We report on an alternative way for users to richly describe themselves, by entering not only responses, but their own questions as well. Data from 10 months of usage shows that users of a social networking site created thousands of diverse questions and reused existing questions from other users. Our findings suggest that those with highly diverse user profiles have a higher number of friends. Copyright 2008 ACM.