Boyd has studied many different aspects of social media, including blogging, computer-mediated communication, tagging, backchanneling, etc. Her earlier work includes visualization of social interaction, artifacts for memory maintenance, and an analysis of how men and women see depth differently in 3D virtual reality systems.
For five years, she worked at V-Day, an organization working to end violence against women and girls worldwide. She also worked as a researcher at Intel, Tribe.net, Google, and Yahoo! She has been featured in major press, including profiles in the Financial Times, San Francisco Magazine, and the New York Times. She has been blogging for 10 years and has been causing trouble online since she was a teen.