I just stumbled upon this interesting empirical study by Human Capital, a media strategy and research group based in London. They looked at data coming from a Nielsen/ Netratings panel-based survey of approximately 40.000 UK-based panelists. In their presentation, Tom Broughton and Heather Pople talk about their 8 hypothesis which they support by their research data.

• Hypothesis 1:
  Facebook is predominantly used by young undergraduates
• Hypothesis 2:
  Facebook use is driven by females
• Hypothesis 3:
  Facebook is the most popular networking site
• Hypothesis 4:
  Facebook is stealing share from other social networking sites
• Hypothesis 5:
  Facebook is one of the most upmarket social networking sites
• Hypothesis 6:
  Early adopters are getting bored by Facebook

Here is the presentation with the corresponding research data:

The is some interesting stuff in there but I’d like to see a more balanced study comparing Facebook more directly with other popular social networking sites, taking a closer look at which users participate actively in more than one network and of course an international perspective could give further insight.