Interesting snippet of the day: Auren Hoffman recently blogged about the growing imbalance between male and female participation in social networks. To boil it down, the most popular social networking sites - Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Plaxo, and Hi5 - are roughly 60:40 female:male. Auren theorizes that the sole exception, LinkedIn (61% male) has the reverse skew because it is highly transactional, unlike the other networks. I can see his point.
Rapleaf calculated the study based upon analysis of its (surprisingly large) user base of 13.2 million, so of course there's a large caveat here that we don't know what Rapleaf's own gender skew is. e.g., if women care more about reputation - and given social norms, it's entirely possible that they do - then these numbers will be off. Your thoughts?
