Sizing up online social networks

While the size of popular Online Social Networks (OSNs) such as MySpace or Twitter has been reported to be in the tens or hundreds of millions of users (and growing), little is known about the fraction of users who have either deleted or abandoned their accounts. Therefore, the growth of an OSN's overall user population and, more importantly, its population of active users cannot be easily determined. In this article, we describe a measurement technique to infer the fine-grained growth in the total number of allocated accounts for a class of OSNs that include MySpace and Twitter and are characterized by two features. First, they assign numerical user IDs using a format and allocation strategy that can be determined. Second, a fraction of their users have abandoned these OSNs shortly after creating their accounts and these short-lived users (called "tourists") are scattered across the ID space. By exploiting these two properties, we are able to determine the growth in to...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: NETWORK
• Authors: Reza Rejaie, Mojtaba Torkjazi, Masoud Valafar, Walter Willinger
• Keywords: NETWORK 2010, Twitter, User, Valid User Accounts