Online Social Network (OSN) is one of the most hottest services in the past years. It preserves the life of users and provides great potential for journalists, sociologists and business analysts. Crawling data from social network is a basic step for social network information analysis and processing. As the net- work becomes huge and information on the network updates faster than web pages, crawling is more dicult because of the limitations of band-width, po- liteness etiquette and computation power. To extract fresh information from social network eciently and eectively, this paper presents a novel crawling method and discusses parallelization architecture of social network. To dis- cover the feature of social network, we gather data from real social network, analyze them and build a model to describe the discipline of users' behavior. With the modeled behavior, we propose methods to predict users' behavior. According to the prediction, we schedule our crawler more reasonably and ex- tract more fresh information with parallelization technologies. Experimental results demonstrate that our strategies could obtain information from OSN eciently and eectively.
Mining and analyzing data from social networks can be difficult because of the large amounts of data involved. Such activities are usually very expensive, as they require a lot of computational resources. With the recent success of cloud computing, data analysis is going to be more accessible due to easier access to less expensive computational resources. In this work we propose to use cloud computing services as a possible solution for analysis of large amounts of data. As a source for a large data set, we propose to use Twitter, yielding a graph with 50 million nodes and 1.8 billion edges. In this paper, we use computation of PageRank on Twitter’s social graph to investigate whether or not cloud computing, and Amazon cloud services1 in particular, can make these tasks more feasible and, as a side effect, whether or not PageRank provides a good ranking of Twitter users. Modern social network analysis relies on vast quantities of data to infer new knowledge about human relations and communication. In this paper we describe TwitterEcho, an open source Twitter crawler for supporting this kind of research, which is characterized by a modular distributed architecture. Our crawler enables researchers to continuously collect data from particular user communities, while respecting Twitter's imposed limits. We present the core modules of the crawling server, some of which were specifically designed to focus the crawl on the Portuguese Twittosphere. Additional modules can be easily implemented, thus changing the focus to a different community. Our evaluation of the system shows high crawling performance and coverage. Given a huge online social network, how do we retrieve information from it through crawling? Even better, how do we improve the crawling performance by using parallel crawlers that work independently? In this paper, we present the framework of parallel crawlers for online social networks, utilizing a centralized queue. To show how this works in practice, we describe our implementation of the crawlers for an online auction website. The crawlers work independently, therefore the failing of one crawler does not affect the others at all. The framework ensures that no redundant crawling would occur. Using the crawlers that we built, we visited a total of approximately 11 million auction users, about 66,000 of which were completely crawled.