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 networks. 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 partial network topologies of MySpace and orkut. Cyworld, the oldest of the three, demonstrates a changing scaling behavior 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 behaviors with different exponents. Very interestingly, each of the two e ponents corresponds to the different segments in Cyworld's degree distribution. Certain online social networking 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 degree correlation pattern to real-life social networks.

@inproceedings{ahn2007topological, author = {Ahn, Yong-Yeol and Han, Seungyeop and Kwak, Haewoon and Moon, Sue and Jeong, Hawoong}, title = {Analysis of topological characteristics of huge online social networking services}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on World Wide Web}, publisher = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, year = {2007}, pages = {835--844}, url = {http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1242685}, doi = {10.1145/1242572.1242685}, isbn = {978-1-59593-654-7}, keywords = {folksonomy, online, analysis, network, sna, social}, abstract = {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 networks. 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 partial network topologies of MySpace and orkut. Cyworld, the oldest of the three, demonstrates a changing scaling behavior 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 behaviors with different exponents. Very interestingly, each of the two e ponents corresponds to the different segments in Cyworld's degree distribution. Certain online social networking 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 degree correlation pattern to real-life social networks.} }

%0 = inproceedings %A = Ahn, Yong-Yeol and Han, Seungyeop and Kwak, Haewoon and Moon, Sue and Jeong, Hawoong %B = Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on World Wide Web %C = New York, NY, USA %D = 2007 %I = ACM %T = Analysis of topological characteristics of huge online social networking services %U = http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1242685