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Dynamics in Online Social Networks

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Dynamics On and Of Complex Networks, Volume 2

Abstract

An increasing number of today’s social interactions occur using online social media as communication channels. Some online social networks have become extremely popular in the last decade. They differ among themselves in the character of the service they provide to online users. For instance, Facebook can be seen mainly as a platform for keeping in touch with close friends and relatives, Twitter is used to propagate and receive news, LinkedIn facilitates the maintenance of professional contacts, and Flickr gathers amateurs and professionals of photography. Albeit different, all these online platforms share an ingredient that pervades all their applications. There exists an underlying social network that allows their users to keep in touch with each other and helps to engage them in common activities or interactions leading to a better fulfillment of the service’s purposes. This is the reason why these platforms share a good number of functionalities, e.g., personal communication channels, broadcasted status updates, easy one-step information sharing, and news feeds exposing broadcasted content. As a result, online social networks are an interesting field to study an online social behavior that seems to be generic among the different online services. Since at the bottom of these services lays a network of declared relations and the basic interactions in these platforms tend to be pairwise, a natural methodology for studying these systems is provided by network science. In this chapter, we describe some of the results of research studies on the structure, dynamics, and social activity in online social networks. We present them in the interdisciplinary context of network science, sociological studies, and computer science.

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Acknowledgement

We acknowledge partial support from the European Commission through PATRES project, the Spanish Ministry of Economy (MINECO) and FEDER (EU) through projects FISICOS (FIS2007-60327) and MODASS (FIS2011-247852). P. A. G. acknowledges support from the JAE program of the CSIC; J. J. R. acknowledges support from the Ramón y Cajal program of MINECO.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos IFISC (CSIC-UIB), E07122, Palma de Mallorca, Spain

    Przemyslaw A. Grabowicz, José J. Ramasco & Víctor M. Eguíluz

Authors
  1. Przemyslaw A. Grabowicz
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  2. José J. Ramasco
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  3. Víctor M. Eguíluz
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Przemyslaw A. Grabowicz .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. Computer Science & Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, 721302, West Bengal, India

    Animesh Mukherjee

  2. Microsoft Research Lab India, 9 Lavelle Road, Bangalore, 560001, India

    Monojit Choudhury

  3. , Laboratoire J.A. Dieudonné, Université de Nice - Sophie Antipolis, Parc Valrose, Nice 02, 06108, France

    Fernando Peruani

  4. Dept. Computer Science & Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, 721302, West Bengal, India

    Niloy Ganguly

  5. Department of Mathematical Engineering, Université Catholique de Louvain, 4, Avenue George Lemaître, Louvain-la-Neuve, B-1348, Belgium

    Bivas Mitra

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Grabowicz, P.A., Ramasco, J.J., Eguíluz, V.M. (2013). Dynamics in Online Social Networks. In: Mukherjee, A., Choudhury, M., Peruani, F., Ganguly, N., Mitra, B. (eds) Dynamics On and Of Complex Networks, Volume 2. Modeling and Simulation in Science, Engineering and Technology. Birkhäuser, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6729-8_1

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