MySpace comments

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Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the characteristics of social network comments to give a broad overview to serve as a baseline for future research. Design/methodology/approach – English comments from a representative sample of public MySpace profiles were examined with a collection of exploratory analyses, using automatic data processing, quantitative techniques and content analyses. Findings – Comments were normally for general friendship maintenance and were typically short, with 95 per cent having 57 or fewer words. They contained a combination of standard spelling, apparently accidental mistakes, slang, sentence fragments, “typographic slang” and interjections. Several new creative spelling variants derived from previous forms of computer-mediated communication have become extremely common, including u, ur, :), haha and lol. The vast majority of comments (97 per cent) contained at least one non-standard language feature, suggesting that members almost universally recognise the informal nature of this kind of messaging. Research limitations/implications – The investigation only covered MySpace and only analysed English comments. Practical implications – MySpace comments should not be written in, or judged by, standard linguistic norms and may cause special problems for information retrieval. Originality/value – This is the first large-scale study of language in social network comments.

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