With the growing use of popular social media services like Facebook and Twitter it is hard to collect all content from the networks without access to the core infrastructure or paying for it. Thus, ...
@cite_2 discuss different methods to transverse social networks from a crawling perspective by focusing on public groups rather than individual users' profiles. Our approach mainly differs from this study in two ways. First, we do not create a social network to transverse and only treat the social media as data, i.e., our proposed method does not require any knowledge of the underlying network. Secondly, we focus on user interactions represented as so called Social Interaction Network (SIN) graphs @cite_0 as it shows the interactions between users in various communities, i.e., SIN graphs can represent interactions of all users on one particular newsgroup or users interacting on a specific topic. To conclude, there are no prior studies, according to our literature review, that address the challenge of collecting data from Facebook after Facebook changed the default privacy policy of its end-users' content. Most studies use online data repositories and do not address the issue of how to efficiently collect data directly from Facebook, or other social media sites.
@cite_0 @cite_2
2117410972 2038817904 2147256592 1893161742
Understanding how users behave when they connect to social networking sites creates opportunities for better interface design, richer studies of social interactions, and improved design of content distribution systems. In this paper, we present a first of a kind analysis of user workloads in online social networks. Our study is based on detailed clickstream data, collected over a 12-day period, summarizing HTTP sessions of 37,024 users who accessed four popular social networks: Orkut, MySpace, Hi5, and LinkedIn. The data were collected from a social network aggregator website in Brazil, which enables users to connect to multiple social networks with a single authentication. Our analysis of the clickstream data reveals key features of the social network workloads, such as how frequently people connect to social networks and for how long, as well as the types and sequences of activities that users conduct on these sites. Additionally, we crawled the social network topology of Orkut, so that we could analyze user interaction data in light of the social graph. Our data analysis suggests insights into how users interact with friends in Orkut, such as how frequently users visit their friends' or non-immediate friends' pages. In summary, our analysis demonstrates the power of using clickstream data in identifying patterns in social network workloads and social interactions. Our analysis shows that browsing, which cannot be inferred from crawling publicly available data, accounts for 92 of all user activities. Consequently, compared to using only crawled data, considering silent interactions like browsing friends' pages increases the measured level of interaction among users. Understanding how users navigate and interact when they connect to social networking sites creates opportunities for better interface design, richer studies of social interactions, and improved design of content distribution systems. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of user workloads in online social networks. This study is based on detailed clickstream data, collected over a 12-day period, summarizing HTTP sessions of 37,024 users who accessed four popular social networks: Orkut, MySpace, Hi5, and LinkedIn. The data were collected from a social network aggregator website in Brazil, which enables users to connect to multiple social networks with a single authentication. Our analysis of the clickstream data reveals key features of the social network workloads, such as how frequently people connect to social networks and for how long, as well as the types and sequences of activities that users conduct on these sites. Additionally, we gather the social network topology of Orkut, so that we could analyze user interaction data in light of the social graph. Our data analysis suggests insights into how users interact with friends in Orkut, such as how frequently users visit their friends' and non-immediate friends' pages. Results show that browsing, which cannot be inferred from crawling publicly available data, accounts for 92 of all user activities. Consequently, compared to using only crawled data, silent interactions like browsing friends' pages increase the measured level of interaction among users. Additionally, we find that friends requesting content are often within close geographical proximity of the uploader. We also discuss a series of implications of our findings for efficient system and interface design as well as for advertisement placement in online social networks. Our goal in this paper is to develop a practical framework for obtaining a uniform sample of users in an online social network (OSN) by crawling its social graph. Such a sample allows to estimate any user property and some topological properties as well. To this end, first, we consider and compare several candidate crawling techniques. Two approaches that can produce approximately uniform samples are the Metropolis-Hasting random walk (MHRW) and a re-weighted random walk (RWRW). Both have pros and cons, which we demonstrate through a comparison to each other as well as to the "ground truth." In contrast, using Breadth-First-Search (BFS) or an unadjusted Random Walk (RW) leads to substantially biased results. Second, and in addition to offline performance assessment, we introduce online formal convergence diagnostics to assess sample quality during the data collection process. We show how these diagnostics can be used to effectively determine when a random walk sample is of adequate size and quality. Third, as a case study, we apply the above methods to Facebook and we collect the first, to the best of our knowledge, representative sample of Facebook users. We make it publicly available and employ it to characterize several key properties of Facebook. We study the structure of the social graph of active Facebook users, the largest social network ever analyzed. We compute numerous features of the graph including the number of users and friendships, the degree distribution, path lengths, clustering, and mixing patterns. Our results center around three main observations. First, we characterize the global structure of the graph, determining that the social network is nearly fully connected, with 99.91 of individuals belonging to a single large connected component, and we confirm the "six degrees of separation" phenomenon on a global scale. Second, by studying the average local clustering coefficient and degeneracy of graph neighborhoods, we show that while the Facebook graph as a whole is clearly sparse, the graph neighborhoods of users contain surprisingly dense structure. Third, we characterize the assortativity patterns present in the graph by studying the basic demographic and network properties of users. We observe clear degree assortativity and characterize the extent to which "your friends have more friends than you". Furthermore, we observe a strong effect of age on friendship preferences as well as a globally modular community structure driven by nationality, but we do not find any strong gender homophily. We compare our results with those from smaller social networks and find mostly, but not entirely, agreement on common structural network characteristics.