User interactions in social networks and their implications

Social networks are popular platforms for interaction, communication and collaboration between friends. Researchers have recently proposed an emerging class of applications that leverage relationships from social networks to improve security and performance in applications such as email, web browsing and overlay routing. While these applications often cite social network connectivity statistics to support their designs, researchers in psychology and sociology have repeatedly cast doubt on the practice of inferring meaningful relationships from social network connections alone. This leads to the question: Are social links valid indicators of real user interaction? If not, then how can we quantify these factors to form a more accurate model for evaluating sociallyenhanced applications? In this paper, we address this question through a detailed study of user interactions in the Facebook social network. We propose the use of interaction graphs to impart meaning to online social links by q...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: EUROSYS
• Authors: Christo Wilson, Bryce Boe, Alessandra Sala, Krishna Puttaswamy, Ben Y. Zhao
• Keywords: EUROSYS 2009, Facebook Social Network, Social Graphs, Social Network Connectivity, System Software