Online social network services (SNS) provide an unprecedented rich source of information about millions of users worldwide.
However, most existing studies of this emerging phenomenon are limited to relatively small data samples, with an emphasis
on mostly “western” online communities (such as Facebook and MySpace users in Western countries). To understand the cultural
characteristics of users of online social networks, this paper explores the behavioral patterns of more than 16 million users
of a popular social network in the Russian segment of the Internet, namely, My.Mail.Ru (also known as “My World” or “Moj Mir”
in Russian). Our main goal is to study the self-disclosure patterns of the site users as a function of their age and gender.
We compare the findings of our analysis to the previous studies on Western users of SNS and discuss the culturally distinctive
aspects. Our study highlights some important cultural differences in usage patterns among Russian users, which call for further
studies in SNS in various cultural contexts.
Keywords Age differences – Correspondence analysis – Cultural differences – Clustering – Gender differences – Information disclosure – Multidimensional scaling – Self-disclosure – Social networking sites