Measurement of the Weibo Hall of Fame Network

Abstract

Weibo, a micro-blogging service provided by Sina at Sep. 2009, attracts over a hundred million users and is growing fast. Though Weibo user publishes any topic within the 140-character limit and follows others to receive their statuses as Twitter user does, Weibo differs from Twitter in many aspects, among which the Hall of Fame (HOF) is one of the most unique character of Weibo. Users in the HOF are all verified and recommended by Weibo, and they are the most popular and representative users. Research on the structure of HOF network can help understanding what Weibo is like and how users connect each other. We have crawled the entire HOF network and obtained 37 thousand user profiles and 3.49 million social relations. In its follower-following topology analysis we have found a power-law follower and following distribution, low reciprocity ratio, short diameter, homophile but no rich club phenomenon between users. Our finding shows that the Weibo HOF is not like online social networks or media websites. The relationship between Weibo users is much looser than online social networks, and all responses to any user's status can be better tracked by social relations than media websites. Weibo focuses on both content and relation, and can be regard as a social media. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first quantitative experimental study on the Weibo HOF network.