Continuing research

I am working very hard on the methodology of my research and analysing every single detail that could be important for my study on identities online and the creation of groups among Mexican youths in online social networks.

My profile in Hi5, Facebook and MySpace is set up completely. You can take a look to it! I am just waiting to increase the number of friends in my networks and start to enlarge them as much as I can!

In Myspace I have 0 friends (ok, Tom is my friend, but he is everybody's friend in Myspace!); in hi5 I have 104; and in Facebook I have 40. It is very funny, but it has been very easy to make friends in Hi5 and Facebook.

However, Myspace seems to be not a very attracting online space for my Mexican friends. Maybe they use it in order to check bands and gigs, but definitely, not for setting up their profiles. I will send invitations to random Mexican people and will start to participate in forums and groups with Mexican youths in this web page.

I have to say that I think that Myspace is not very user-friendly in comparison with Hi5 or even in comparison with Facebook (despite the large number of applications that we can find in the last one). In order to set colours, music and different font styles, one requires much more knowledge of the internet, than in the other two networks. I will work on this, and have a cool profile, as I think I do in Hi5 and Facebook, however, it seems to be more difficult.

Nevertheless, in Myspace I felt freer to write anything. The social pressure is not there maybe because I did not have any of my friend’s profiles in my list of friends. I know that Myspace is a public space and everybody can take a look at my profile. However, for some reason, I find people in myspace more open and at the same time less connected to each other’s than in the other two social networks.
The banners that I found today in Myspace are from: Mcafee, swinky (avatars) weight watchers, the Dead Room, Monster.co.uk, lions for lambs (new movie). Maybe now that my profile is set up in Spanish these banners are going to change in order to attract my attention as a Spanish speaker consumer.
I have found out that the forum "AMOR Y RELACIONES" (Love and relationships) found in Spanish language forums is the biggest forum among Spanish speaking people. It has 3,962 topics and 39,277 posts. It is divided in four sections: general, flirts, nutrition and breaking ups. In contrast, Vida Universitaria (student life) is the last one in the list of forums and it has 122 topics and 441 posts. This could reflect that myspace participants are more interested in sharing comments about love and relationships, or maybe just flirting, than sharing comments about student life or revolution, if there would be such a group!

However, in both sections, people ask to meet new people and we can find topics that do not have anything to do with the section that they are supposed to belong to. For example, people selling different products and spamming the forums.
I am thinking that, maybe at the end of the day, my research is not going to be focused on this network. We will see...