Auren Hoffman writes about the gender gap in social media.

At Rapleaf we conducted a study of 13.2 million people and how they are using social media. While the trends among the sexes indicate they are both massively using social media, women are far outpacing men.

If you are creating a new Web 2.0 site and you want to go viral, you target women. Young women drive virality and so all the new innovation is targeted towards them. That means that the gender gap on social networks (and increasingly in all of social media) is only going to widen. More and more innovation will be targeted towards women and they will continue to get more engaged. And while we expect men’s adoption to social media to continue to increase, it will likely be slower than the rate of adoption by women.

Interesting insights. It’s exciting to be able to see the usage patters on social networks so transparently. A friend recently has access to a few hours of social network traffic and was appalled at the baseness of what people do, really lowest-common-denominator stuff.