The Female Story on Facebook!

I have always wondered why women get more ‘likes’ on Facebook as compared to men? Although I have been on Facebook for about 5 years now, I tend to underestimate the power of it and initially was really skeptical about the whole idea. I never thought Facebook would last beyond 4 years and I was pretty convinced that it would eventually follow the same suit as Orkut.

And here we are, almost 8 years after the launch of this mastermind platform called ‘Facebook’, glued to it day in and day out. Now, there are cell phones with special click button especially for Facebook but not a special click button to the Helpline. Funny, isn't it? How one piece of technology and innovation can alter our lives!

However, all’s not well for the people on Facebook. There are the ‘Social Butterflies’ with over 5,000 friends but can hardly remember the names of 100. Facebook has been able to gather crowd from various age groups. The minimum age required to join Facebook is 13. Even so, there are children below the age 12 who are hooked on to Facebook to play the free ‘cool’ games and bombard everyone on their lists with game requests. We also have our Old Folk who are utterly captivated by the beauty of Facebook and are going gaga about it. The fact that the oldies can connect to their long-lost friends (Of course those who are still alive.) is very fascinating to them. Women tend to put up pictures to appease their friends and fish for compliments. Young girls often mistake Facebook for a personal diary and pour out their puberty-fuelled emotions. Boys, on the other hand, try to display their Macho side even if does not exist.

Gone are the days when you'd have to actually call up people to ask where they were and what they were doing. Just recently, I had this friend from college who messaged his mother saying he was busy with class and the very next moment his mother liked his Facebook post which declared, 'XXX Is at IMAX with Sexy Lady (Name Undisclosed).'

So how much do we believe what we see on Facebook?

We (Chinmay & Ria) decided to conduct a quick experiment. Both of us put up the exact same status on our respective Facebook pages and gave it some time to check out how many people will actually our status.
Our main aim was to prove that women generally evoke more response on Facebook than men.

The status:

'Success is like a fart.

It only bothers people when it's not their own.'

Our findings suggested the following:

•  Ria Shenoy ended up with 21 more likes than Chinmay Shenoy
•  Nobody commented on Chinmay's status but there was 1 comment on Ria's.

Now, this is something we got from the results but according to the predictions or the actual ratio what should have been the real output? 

•  Chinmay has 1950 friends on Facebook whereas Ria has 1069  thus  Chinmay has almost 82% more friends than Ria.
• If Chinmay got 14 likes then the according to the prediction, Ria should have gotten 8 likes (7.69  to be precise) and nothing more.
• Furthermore, Ria ended up getting 35 likes and that is 27 likes more than what was predicted being almost 438% higher!

This is a two part series and all our findings along with the conclusion will be highlighted in the next post.
The second part will include:
a) How differently people react to serious as well as a stupid status updates.
b) The kind of people who like our status.

Why did I think about this? In case you didn't know already, there are some geniuses out there who like their own status! I found a Facebook group which gives the perfect explanation for this ridiculous behaviour, "Liking your own status is like Hi5ing yourself in public"