8. Conclusions and Recommendations
8.2 Limitations of my research and suggestion for future
There are several limitations that the researcher encountered during the study. First, there is very little literature available in the area of social-networking web-sites. Although scholars from different fields have done research on this new phenomenon, few communication scholars have studied it. Second, since Facebook, Friendster are not public companies yet, and the finance reports are not posted public, the revenue of these SNS are estimated and possible
aren’t accurate.
Future research can look at how successful Friendster is at helping its users finding the one.
Interviews with Asian people to learn whether they are encountering any conflict surrounding their use of Friendster as a place to find dates or their future partners would be useful. Along these same lines, study of other elements presented on the users profiles, such as blogs and testimonials, to find out more about Asian people’s on-line self-presentation would add to this research. Comparison studies in terms of gender and culture are also appealing. Researchers could study how men advertise themselves on SNS, and cross-cultural comparisons between Friendster users from eastern and western cultures would be interesting. Third, in addition to Friendster, there are many online community websites that advertise themselves as places to meet new friends. Some examples would be Facebook, My space, Bebo, etc. It would be valuable to learn how these sites compare one another. Future research could involve interviews of competitor site users to learn if they prefer them to each sites and, if so, why. On the other hand, it would be appealing to do a follow up study focusing on how SNS are handling these competitions and about the brand-loyalty of each SNS users.
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