Exploring People in Social Networking Sites: A Comprehensive Analysis of Social Networking Sites
Saleh Albelwi, Khaled Almgren

Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to make comparisons between Facebook users who are living in the US and those who are living in the Middle East. These comparisons include demographical properties, interests, gender, marital status, age, education level, incentive of relationship, and distribution of friends, as well as an investigation of whether users who have both a Facebook and a MySpace account have the same or different friends in each network and why. Making comparisons between users requires collecting users’ profiles on Facebook and MySpace. Therefore, I created two online applications written using JavaScript API and PHP. These applications were deployed on Facebook and MySpace, and they have the ability to access a user’s profile and friends on those social networking sites and then to store the information in a database. A large volume of data was collected that represents millions of users. Analyzing the collected data will give researchers insight into the features of Facebook users in different cultures. In addition, it will tell us whether a user has the same or different friends across SNSs and explain why some people create an account with more than one SNS. The findings show that there are many differences between the users of Facebook in the USA and the users in the Middle East. Some of the characteristics are different due to the difference in culture and customs. There are some unexpected results, such as the fact that MySpace is not popular in the Middle East. In addition, there are people who have an account with Facebook and an account with MySpace at the same time. The study found that some people have different friends on different SNSs, and others have the same friends. Overall, I have made deep investigations in this paper.

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