Understanding online social network usage from a network perspective

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have already attracted more than half a billion users. However, our understanding of which OSN features attract and keep the attention of these users is poor. Studies thus far have relied on surveys or interviews of OSN users or focused on static properties, e. g., the friendship graph, gathered via sampled crawls. In this paper, we study how users actually interact with OSNs by extracting clickstreams from passively monitored network traffic. Our characterization of user interactions within the OSN for four different OSNs (Facebook, LinkedIn, Hi5, and StudiVZ) focuses on feature popularity, session characteristics, and the dynamics within OSN sessions. We find, for example, that users commonly spend more than half an hour interacting with the OSNs while the byte contributions per OSN session are relatively small. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.2.2 [Computer-communication networks]: Network protocols—Applications; C.2.3 [Computer-communication n...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: IMC
• Authors: Fabian Schneider, Anja Feldmann, Balachander Krishnamurthy, Walter Willinger
• Keywords: IMC 2009, Internet Technology, Online Social Networks, Session Characteristics, User Interactions