Creation and growth of online social network

Musial, Katarzyna; Budka, Marcin; Juszczyszyn, Krzysztof

doi:10.1007/s11280-012-0177-1

Open Access
Published: 07 July 2012

Creation and growth of online social network

How do social networks evolve?

Katarzyna Musial¹,
Marcin Budka² &
Krzysztof Juszczyszyn³

World Wide Web volume 16, pages 421–447 (2013)Cite this article

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Abstract

Social networks are an example of complex systems consisting of nodes that can interact with each other and based on these activities the social relations are defined. The dynamics and evolution of social networks are very interesting but at the same time very challenging areas of research. In this paper the formation and growth of one of such structures extracted from data about human activities within online social networking system is investigated. Dynamics of both local and global characteristics are studied. Analysis of the dynamics of the network growth showed that it changes over time—from random process to power-law growth. The phase transition between those two is clearly visible. In general, node degree distribution can be described as the scale-free but it does not emerge straight from the beginning. Social networks are known to feature high clustering coefficient and friend-of-a-friend phenomenon. This research has revealed that in online social network, although the clustering coefficient grows over time, it is lower than expected. Also the friend-of-a-friend phenomenon is missing. On the other hand, the length of the shortest paths is small starting from the beginning of the network existence so the small-world phenomenon is present. The unique element of the presented study is that the data, from which the online social network was extracted, represents interactions between users from the beginning of the social networking site existence. The system, from which the data was obtained, enables users to interact using different communication channels and it gives additional opportunity to investigate multi-relational character of human relations.

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Authors and Affiliations

Department of Informatics, School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences, King’s College London, Strand Campus, WC2R 2LS, London, UK
Katarzyna Musial
Smart Technology Research Centre, Bournemouth University, BH12 5BB, Poole, UK
Marcin Budka
Faculty of Computer Science and Management, Wroclaw University of Technology, Wyb. Wyspianskiego 27, Wroclaw, Poland
Krzysztof Juszczyszyn

Authors

Katarzyna Musial
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Marcin Budka
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Krzysztof Juszczyszyn
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Correspondence to Katarzyna Musial.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Musial, K., Budka, M. & Juszczyszyn, K. Creation and growth of online social network. World Wide Web 16, 421–447 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-012-0177-1

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Received: 07 January 2012
Revised: 03 May 2012
Accepted: 25 June 2012
Published: 07 July 2012
Issue Date: July 2013
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-012-0177-1

Keywords

online social network
complex system dynamics
network growth and evolution
dynamics of relationships of different types
local and global network characteristics