Why Use Social Networks?

First of all I would like to anticipate that this is a very controversial and provocative post!

I want to get your view on it....

I was wondering why people use social networks. The intent, initially, are to catch up with friends, share a piece of your life and etc. However , I think some, if not most, use the tool to really show off!! I cannot prove or support well this argument, but I have a feeling that it is true...

People show off their trips, jobs, number of friends and others. Very often it's unnecessary or strange to have your life exposed to anyone. For example, we know that one can handle 120 friendships via social networks (Laura's post)... but some really want to have 1000+ friends! As mentioned in class in the past, human being loves ranks and number of friends might be a sign of status.. to say "I am pop!" .. is it?

Recently, reading Hamish's blog, I've got to know Secret Twitter .. very interesting because it's anonymous and you can read what really goes in people's minds. Having fun and being really scared after reading some "secrets" there....

Well, if the user's goals are to show off... Twitter is THE TOOL! Because you can share whatever you're doing whenever you can.. Just to illustrate, look at the distribution of number of tweets per user per day:



So, there is one lonely soul tweeting more than 200 times a day?!?!??!? WTF!

Here is some data on Social Networks (source: eMarketer)



Finally, the unanswered question still be how much of your time would you use to tweet and why? I have no idea.