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A comparative study of three social networking websites

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Abstract

Recently, the number of social networking sites is rapidly increasing, and the number of users joining these sites is dramatically increasing as well. This paper aims at comprehensively comparing three social networking sites, and provides an in-depth analysis. We compare three of the most popular social networking sites, i.e., Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Specifically, we evaluate those social networking sites based on four criteria (i.e., navigation, interactivity, source credibility and intelligence). For each criterion, we propose a list of measures for the comparison. The comparison essentially explores the differences and commonalities among those social networking sites. Based on the analysis of the comparison, a user study is conducted to evaluate the three websites.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND, USA

    Krishna C. Chinthakayala & Jun Kong

  2. Western Illinois University, Macomb, IL, USA

    Chunying Zhao

  3. Tianjin University, Tianjin, China

    Kang Zhang

  4. The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA

    Kang Zhang

Authors
  1. Krishna C. Chinthakayala
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  2. Chunying Zhao
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  3. Jun Kong
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  4. Kang Zhang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jun Kong.

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Chinthakayala, K.C., Zhao, C., Kong, J. et al. A comparative study of three social networking websites. World Wide Web 17, 1233–1259 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-013-0222-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-013-0222-8

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