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A sample of how many new interests appear every day on social networks.

How many new interests are registered every day

Using our vast collection of interests we tried to get an answer to this question by submitting all interests to Google Adwords Traffic estimator.  The results are displayed on this graph:

There is a slight positive correlation between relative frequency and search volume only for interests with below average relative frequency. In other words, a person interested in exotic and obscure fields cannot expect Google search volume for such an interest to be high.

However, for the vast majority of interests, namely those with average or above average relative frequency, we were not able to determine a clear relationship between search volume and relative frequency of an interest.

Some social networking sites, like Facebook or MySpace, require a confirmation when a user wishes to list another user as a “friend”. Other sites, like LiveJournal for example, do not impose this requirement. This “one way” relationship is usually referred in terms of FOAF as “knows”. There are no restriction on reciprocal “knows”. In my opinion, groups of users with mutual reciprocal ties can be considered as “friends” as well. How else  would you define a group in the center of the diagram below?

This is what our interest universe looks like using a two-dimensional map of non-metric multi-dimensional scaling.

All sites that we used as a source for our Interest Matrix™ directly ask their users to list their interests. However, when you compare interests from various sources, the difference in frequency is astonishing (see graphs below). Users sometimes confuse interests with tags.

Wikipedia provides the following definition of Interest: “The interests of an individual in particular aspects of life, culture, and society which most attract his or her attention” and defines Tag as a label, “… used to describe an object…” It seems that there is nothing in common; however, a current internet tendency to put a tag on everything influences the way how internet users enter or even understand their interests.

Let us look at the usage of the word “bizarre”as an example. By definition, this is an adjective and therefore is more suitable to be used as a tag then as a specific interest. In our Interest Matrix™, the interest “bizarre” have cumulative frequency of 0.00001. However, on the graph from source 1 you can see that the term “bizarre” occupies the 5^th place in top “interests” from this source.

It seems that sites that have nothing to do with tagging could collect much more “pure” interests. Nevertheless, each additional source of an independently collected interest adds up to 10% to our interest collection and should consider all additional sources, even with “bizarre” results.

As it was expected, frequency distribution of all 400,000 unique interests that we studied is exponential. About a quarter of all studied people have 400 interests in common. Top 3,000 interests are common for about 50% of all people. About 30,000 of the people studied have at least one unique interest.