Yong-Yeol Ahn,Seungyeop Han, Haewoon Kwak, Sue Moon, Hawoong Jeong
16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), Banff, Alberta, CANADA, May 2007
Social networking services are a fast-growing business in the
Internet. However, it is unknown if online relationships and
their growth patterns are the same as in real-life social net-
works. In this paper, we compare the structures of three
online social networking services: Cyworld, MySpace, and
orkut, each with more than 10 million users, respectively.
We have access to complete data of Cyworld¡¯s ilchon (friend)
relationships and analyze its degree distribution, clustering
property, degree correlation, and evolution over time. We
also use Cyworld data to evaluate the validity of snowball
sampling method, which we use to crawl and obtain par-
tial network topologies of MySpace and orkut. Cyworld,
the oldest of the three, demonstrates a changing scaling be-
havior over time in degree distribution. The latest Cyworld
data¡¯s degree distribution exhibits a multi-scaling behavior,
while those of MySpace and orkut have simple scaling be-
haviors with different exponents. Very interestingly, each
of the two exponents corresponds to the different segments
in Cyworld¡¯s degree distribution. Certain online social net-
working services encourage online activities that cannot be
easily copied in real life; we show that they deviate from
close-knit online social networks which show a similar de-
gree correlation pattern to real-life social networks.
[PDF (Corrected & extended version 776KB)]
@inproceedings{2007-www-social-networking,
author = "Yong-Yeol Ahn and Seungyeop Han and Haewoon Kwak and Sue Moon and Hawoong Jeong",
title = "{Analysis of topological characteristics of huge online social networking services}",
booktitle = {WWW '07: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web},
year = {2007},
isbn = {978-1-59593-654-7},
pages = {835--844},
location = {Banff, Alberta, Canada},
doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1242572.1242685},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA}
}