In the advent of the Internet, web-mediated social networking has become of great influence to Filipinos. Networking sites such as Friendster, YouTube, FaceBook and MySpace are among the most well known sites on the Internet. These sites provide a wide range of services to users from different parts of the world, such as connecting and finding people, as well as, sharing and organizing contents. The popularity and accessibility of these sites enable information to be available. These allow people to analyze and study the characteristics of the population of online social networks. In this study, we developed a computer program to analyze the structural dynamics of a locally popular social networking site: The Friendster Network. Understanding the structural dynamics of a virtual community has many implications, such as finding an improvement on the current networking system, among others. Based on our analysis, we found out that users of the site exhibit preferential attachment to users with high number of friends.
There have already been previous studies related to online social networks. The first one was a study of four sites: Flickr, YouTube, Orkut and LiveJournal. The data set consisted of about 1.8 million users from Flickr, 5.2 million users from LiveJournal, 3 million users from Orkut, and 1.1 million users from YouTube. The study showed that the structure of social networks and its characteristics differ from those networks mentioned earlier. It was found that online social networks have more links and are highly clustered. Nodes with high number of links towards them also have a high probability of having a high number of links coming from them. These online social networks are composed of clusters which are highly connected. However, these clusters are composed of nodes with low number of links. This resulted to the inversely proportional values of the clustering coefficient with respect to the number of links of each node. Although the path lengths are short, most paths passed through nodes which are highly connected @cite_7 .
@cite_7
2115022330 2131112624 2117410972 2038817904
Online social networking sites like Orkut, YouTube, and Flickr are among the most popular sites on the Internet. Users of these sites form a social network, which provides a powerful means of sharing, organizing, and finding content and contacts. The popularity of these sites provides an opportunity to study the characteristics of online social network graphs at large scale. Understanding these graphs is important, both to improve current systems and to design new applications of online social networks. This paper presents a large-scale measurement study and analysis of the structure of multiple online social networks. We examine data gathered from four popular online social networks: Flickr, YouTube, LiveJournal, and Orkut. We crawled the publicly accessible user links on each site, obtaining a large portion of each social network's graph. Our data set contains over 11.3 million users and 328 million links. We believe that this is the first study to examine multiple online social networks at scale. Our results confirm the power-law, small-world, and scale-free properties of online social networks. We observe that the indegree of user nodes tends to match the outdegree; that the networks contain a densely connected core of high-degree nodes; and that this core links small groups of strongly clustered, low-degree nodes at the fringes of the network. Finally, we discuss the implications of these structural properties for the design of social network based systems. Online social networking sites like MySpace, Orkut, and Flickr are among the most popular sites on the Web and continue to experience dramatic growth in their user population. The popularity of these sites offers a unique opportunity to study the dynamics of social networks at scale. Having a proper understanding of how online social networks grow can provide insights into the network structure, allow predictions of future growth, and enable simulation of systems on networks of arbitrary size. However, to date, most empirical studies have focused on static network snapshots rather than growth dynamics. In this paper, we collect and examine detailed growth data from the Flickr online social network, focusing on the ways in which new links are formed. Our study makes two contributions. First, we collect detailed data covering three months of growth, encompassing 950,143 new users and over 9.7 million new links, and we make this data available to the research community. Second, we use a first-principles approach to investigate the link formation process. In short, we find that links tend to be created by users who already have many links, that users tend to respond to incoming links by creating links back to the source, and that users link to other users who are already close in the network. 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.