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.
Another one investigated on the topological characteristics of huge online social networking services. The structures of three online social networking services, Cyworld, MySpace, and Orkut were compared. The number of examined users was 100,000 for each social networking site. Results showed that these networks follow the power-law distribution having a heavy tail. Based on the analysis of the degree distribution of Cyworld, researchers found out that it supported the claim that the diversity of the types of users greatly affects different network characteristics such as clustering coefficient, evolution of the network size, average path length and the network's diameter. The results of the analysis of MySpace and Orkut followed the patterns found in the different regions of the Cyworld network @cite_1 .
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Social networking services are a fast-growing business in the Internet. However, it is unknown if online relationships and their growth patterns are the same as in real-life social networks. In this paper, we compare the structures of three online social networking services: Cyworld, MySpace, and orkut, each with more than 10 million users, respectively. We have access to complete data of Cyworld's ilchon (friend) relationships and analyze its degree distribution, clustering property, degree correlation, and evolution over time. We also use Cyworld data to evaluate the validity of snowball sampling method, which we use to crawl and obtain partial network topologies of MySpace and orkut. Cyworld, the oldest of the three, demonstrates a changing scaling behavior over time in degree distribution. The latest Cyworld data's degree distribution exhibits a multi-scaling behavior, while those of MySpace and orkut have simple scaling behaviors with different exponents. Very interestingly, each of the two e ponents corresponds to the different segments in Cyworld's degree distribution. Certain online social networking services encourage online activities that cannot be easily copied in real life; we show that they deviate from close-knit online social networks which show a similar degree correlation pattern to real-life social networks.