Exploring user sociocentric and egocentric behaviors in online and detected social networks

Abstract

Social ties are increasingly constructed and maintained by online social networking tools. These online tools provide an alternative to the more traditional physical meeting approach of establishing and maintaining social relationships. This paper explores the similarities and the differences between the Bluetooth-based detected social network and the Facebook social network, for a particular set of users. Specifically, we explore and compare the egocentric and the sociocentric behaviors of nodes, highlighting the structural similarities between the two types of networks and the differences in how individuals take part in detected social network and online social network. Performing a sociocentric network analysis, our results indicate that betweenness centrality has a relatively high correlation, while the other users' centrality measures in the online social network and the detected social network vary considerably. Moreover, our results shows that the community structures of the two networks differ. The egocentric analysis further confirms that the detected and the online social networks have different structural characteristics.