When it comes to social media sites (and particularly those that involve photo-sharing), you might want to also account for 1) the people who are forced to spend all day every day with politicians, attorneys general, and policy makers in every state and every country; 2) the hundreds of people who sit and sift through photographs/video looking for illegal content; 3) the round-the-clock staff who field calls from FBI and police; 4) the large teams who battle spam, phishing and hacking; 5) the legal team who has to deal with everyone and then some suing them over issues of safety, porn, etc.
https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2009-June/003646.html
Boyd (2009) – re: MySpace staff cuts
Boyd (2007) – Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship
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