Analysis of topological characteristics of huge online social networking services

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 interesti...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Yong-Yeol Ahn, Seungyeop Han, Haewoon Kwak, Sue B. Moon, Hawoong Jeong
• Keywords: Internet Technology, Latest Cyworld Data, Real-life Social Networks, Social Networking Services, WWW 2007