Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

5-2007

Abstract

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.

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Publication

WWW '07: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on World Wide Web, Banff Alberta, Canada, 2007 May 8-12

First Page

835

Last Page

844

ISBN

9781595936547

Identifier

10.1145/1242572.1242685

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/1242572.1242685

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