Affiliations based on shared interests, political views, activities, identity, passions, location | SNS core features: profiles, Friends, comments, private messaging | Friendster gained traction among 3 groups of early adopters—bloggers, attendees of Burning Man, and gays—and grew to 300k users through word of mouth | MySpace was able to grow rapidly by capitalizing on Friendster’s alienation of its early adopters; then bands-and-fans dynamics helped to expand beyond them—into 3 populations: musicians/artists, teenagers, and post-college urban social crowd | Personalising “feature” emerged because MySpace did not restrict users from adding HTML into profile frame forms | Facebook was designed to support distinct college networks only, later expanded to include hi school students, professionals @corp networks, and, eventually, everyone | SNSs are primarily organized around people, not interests | Friends provide context by offering users an imagined audience to guide behavioral norms
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html