How people make friends in social networking sites—A microscopic perspective

Abstract

We study the detailed growth of a social networking site with full temporal information by examining the creation process of each friendship relation that can collectively lead to the macroscopic properties of the network. We first study the reciprocal behavior of users, and find that link requests are quickly responded to and that the distribution of reciprocation intervals decays in an exponential form. The degrees of inviters/accepters are slightly negatively correlative with reciprocation time. In addition, the temporal feature of the online community shows that the distributions of intervals of user behaviors, such as sending or accepting link requests, follow a power law with a universal exponent, and peaks emerge for intervals of an integral day. We finally study the preferential selection and linking phenomena of the social networking site and find that, for the former, a linear preference holds for preferential sending and reception, and for the latter, a linear preference also holds for preferential acceptance, creation, and attachment. Based on the linearly preferential linking, we put forward an analyzable network model which can reproduce the degree distribution of the network. The research framework presented in the paper could provide a potential insight into how the micro-motives of users lead to the global structure of online social networks.

Making “Friends” in a Virtual World

“…This has also been called the rich get richer effect. Some authors have suggested to distinguish between preferential creation and preferential reception in directed networks (Hu & Wang, 2012;Mislove, Koppula, Gummadi, Druschel, & Bhattacharjee, 2008;J. Zhao, Lui, Towsley, Guan, & Zhou, 2011).…”

“…Researchers who have distinguished preferential creation from preferential reception have usually only used in-degree (i.e., sent invitations) to predict creation and out-degree (received invitations) to predict reception (Mislove et al, 2008; S. Zhao, 2006) or found that out-degree is the better predictor of preferential reception (Hu & Wang, 2012). However, there is also a theoretical reason to expect that the number of received friendship requests is the more important predictor; it is the cue with a higher warranting value, that is, a cue that is more difficult to manipulate (Walther & Parks, 2002).…”

Predicting Popularity of Twitter Accounts through the Discovery of Link-Propagating Early Adopters

“…The results of the research are also helpful for understanding the behavior of people on social media. There have been some studies that have shown that the behavior reported in the past research in sociology is also observed on social media [7,12,6,15]. One of such studies on the behavior of people has proposed the concept of triadic closure for explaining how people behave when they connect to each other.…”

Gender-specific preference in online dating

“…As a special type of social networking sites [1][2][3], online dating sites have emerged as popular platforms for single people to seek potential romance. According to a recent survey, nearly 40 million single people (out of 54 million) in the U.S. have been trying online dating, and about 20% of committed relationships began online [4].…”