Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the characteristics of social network comments to give a broad overview to serve as a baseline for future research. Design/methodology/approach English comments from a representative sample of public MySpace profiles were examined with a collection of exploratory analyses, using automatic data processing, quantitative techniques and content analyses. Findings Comments were normally for general friendship maintenance and were typically short, with 95 per cent having 57 or fewer words. They contained a combination of standard spelling, apparently accidental mistakes, slang, sentence fragments, “typographic slang” and interjections. Several new creative spelling variants derived from previous forms of computer‐mediated communication have become extremely common, including u, ur,:), haha and lol. The vast majority of comments (97 per cent) contained at least one non‐standard language feature, suggesting that members almost universally recognise the informal nature of this kind of messaging. Research limitations/implications The investigation only covered MySpace and only analysed English comments. Practical implications MySpace comments should not be written in, or judged by, standard linguistic norms and may cause special problems for information retrieval. Originality/value This is the first large‐scale study of language in social network comments.