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Study of the Growth of a New Social Network Platform

Authors:
Ning Tang
Chunhong Zhang

Keywords: social network sites; growth; power-law degree distribution; topological properties.

Abstract:
Nowadays, with the rapid development of social network sites (SNS), many efforts have been made on the analysis of such networks, which is important for us to enrich our social network knowledge and improve the SNS design. However, most analysis have focused on the very popular SNS, there is little comprehensive analysis of growing process of a SNS from the exact original stage, therefore, lacking of deep understanding how the SNS evolve over time. In this paper, a comprehensive growth data set of a new social network site constructed by our lab is examined to see the growing process of the network and to find some underlying growth mechanisms. This observation provides an empirical evidence of the Barabási-Albert (BA) model. During the observation, the number of new added links is shown to have a linear relationship with the number of new added users and there is a preferential attachment phenomenon in the link formation process. In addition, the degree distribution at different time points is presented to see the formation of the power-law distribution. Finally, the topological properties are found to be stable after a period of development, though the network is still growing.

Pages: 14 to 19

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2011

Publication date: October 23, 2011

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3484

ISBN: 978-1-61208-161-8

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from October 23, 2011 to October 29, 2011