Abstract
The key feature of online social networks is the ability of users to become active, make friends and interact with those around them. Such interaction is typically perceived as critical to these platforms; therefore, a significant share of research has investigated the characteristics of social links, friendship relations, community structure, searching for the role and importance of individual members.
In this paper, we present results from a multi-year study of the online social network Digg.com, indicating that the importance of friends and the friend network in the propagation of information is less than originally perceived. While we note that users form and maintain social structure, the importance of these links and their contribution is very low: Even nearly identically interested friends are only activated with a probability of 2% and only in 50% of stories that became popular we find evidence that the social ties were critical to the spread.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Richardson, M., Domingos, P.: Mining knowledge-sharing sites for viral marketing. In: ACM SIGKDD (2002)
Yang, W.-S., Dia, J.-B., Cheng, H.-C., Lin, H.-T.: Mining social networks for targeted advertising. In: 39th Hawaii International Conf. (2006)
Surowieck, J.: The Wisdom of Crowds. Anchor (2005)
Davitz, J., Yu, J., Basu, S., Gutelius, D., Harris, A.: ilink: search and routing in social networks. In: ACM SIGKDD (2007)
Boyd, D.M., Ellison, N.B.: Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. J. of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1), 210 (2007)
Katz, E., Lazarsfeld, P.F.: Personal Influence. Free Press, New York (1955)
Koller, D.: Representation, reasoning and learning (2001)
Fono, D., Raynes-Goldie, K.: Hyperfriends and beyond: Friendship and social norms on livejournal. Internet Research Annual 4 (2006)
Raynes-Goldie, K.: Pulling sense out of today’s informational chaos: Livejournal as a site of knowledge creation and sharing. First Monday 8(12) (2004)
Ellison, N.B., Steinfield, C., Lampe, C.: The benefits of facebook “friends:” social capital and college students’ use of online social network sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12, 1143–1168 (2007)
Granovetter, M.: The strength of weak ties. Am. J. of Sociology 78 (1973)
Mislove, A., Marcon, M., Gummadi, K., Druschel, P., Bhattacharjee, B.: Measurement and analysis of online social networks. In: IMC Conference (2007)
Leskovec, J., Horvitz, E.: Planetary-scale views on a large instant-messaging network. In: WWW 2008 (2008)
Cha, M., Mislove, A., Gummadi, K.P.: A measurement-driven analysis of information propagation in the flickr social network. In: WWW 2009 (2009)
Cha, M., Kwak, H., Rodriguez, P., Ahn, Y.Y., Moon, S.: Analyzing the video popularity characteristics of large-scale user generated content systems. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (2009)
Keller, E.B., Berry, J.: The Influentials: One American in Ten Tells the Other Nine How to Vote, Where to Eat, and what to Buy. The Free Press, New York (2003)
Ahn, Y.Y., Han, S., Kwak, H., Moon, S., Jeong, H.: Analysis of topological characteristics of huge online social networking services. In: WWW 2007 (2007)
Rüschendorf, L.: The Wasserstein Distance and Approximation Theorems (1985)
Scott, J.P.: Social Network Analysis: A Handbook. Sage, London (2000)
Benevenuto, F., Rodrigues, T., Cha, M., Almeida, V.: Characterizing user behavior in online social networks. In: IMC 2009 (2009)
Lorentz, M.O.: Methods of measuring the concentration of wealth. Publications of the American Statistical Association 9(70), 209–219 (1905)
Simon, H.A.: On a class of skew distribution functions. Biometrika (1955)
Csermely, P.: Weak Links: Stabilizers of Complex Systems from Proteins to Social Networks. Springer, Berlin (2006)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Doerr, C., Tang, S., Blenn, N., Van Mieghem, P. (2011). Are Friends Overrated? A Study for the Social Aggregator Digg.com. In: Domingo-Pascual, J., Manzoni, P., Palazzo, S., Pont, A., Scoglio, C. (eds) NETWORKING 2011. NETWORKING 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6641. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20798-3_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20798-3_24
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-20797-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-20798-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)