The Connector Website Model New Implications for Social ... - PRWeb

judgment on whether or not a given connector demonstrated exponential change in the
time period May 2005 through June 2006. The determination will be based on the
following observations:
(1) Percentage change over the time period, May 2005 to June 2006;
(2) Traffic trend estimation with respect to an exponential function;
(3) Website volatility
A couple cautions and limitations should be mentioned at this point. The
following data analysis is exploratory and descriptive - causality cannot be asserted using
the methods I employ here. I am also unable to distinguish between the characteristics
attributed to the host organization from those of the online community of users. I treat
them as a single entity, what I have been referring to as a social institution. This analysis
is strongly suggestive, but not conclusive, since we are looking at a relatively small
number of connector websites. In any case we should be able to learn more about
longitudinal trends on thirteen popular connector websites and see if past trends may
have future implications for social change.
comScore Media Metric Analysis
Table 3 lists the connector websites in rank order of monthly unique visitors
(hereafter, traffic) in June 2006. MySpace clearly separates itself from the pack, having
more than three times the number users when compared to the nearest connector. The
U.S. traffic coming to MySpace is about 30% of the U.S. traffic on the entire Internet.
Classmates.com and Facebook each claim roughly 8% of U.S. Internet users. Moving
18