Social Media SM were dependent as multifunctional networking tools that tend to provide an more and more wider variety of amenities, making it challenging to check their core purpose and venture, hence, their type. This paper assesses this evolution of Social Media Types SMTs, presents, and evaluates a novel hypothesis based data driven method for analyzing Social Media Platforms SMPs and categorizing SMTs. We review and update literature regarding the categorization of SMPs, based on their facilities. We increase a strategy to propose and evaluate a new taxonomy, comprising: i the hypothesis that the variety of SMTs is smaller than what existing literature suggests, ii observations on data concerning SM usage and iii experimentation using association rules and clustering algorithms.
As a result, we suggest three 3 SMTs, namely Social, Entertainment and Profiling networks, usually capturing emerging SMP services. Our outcomes show that our hypothesis is validated by implementing our technique and we discuss threats to validity.
