Characteristics Of Online Social Networks Research Articles

Generating trusted graphs for trust evaluation in online social networks

We propose a novel trust framework to address the issue of “Can Alice trust Bob on a service?” in large online social networks (OSNs). Many models have been proposed for constructing and calculating trust. However, two common shortcomings make them less practical, especially in large OSNs: the information used to construct trust is (1) usually too complicated to get or maintain, that is, it is resource consuming; and (2) usually subjective and changeable, which makes it vulnerable to vicious nodes. With those problems in mind, we focus on generating small trusted graphs for large OSNs, which can be used to make previous trust evaluation algorithms more efficient and practical. We show how to preprocess a social network (PSN) by developing a simple and practical user-domain-based trusted acquaintance chain discovery algorithm through using the small-world network characteristics of online social networks and taking advantage of “weak ties”. Then, we present how to build a trust network (BTN) and generate a trusted graph (GTG) with the adjustable width breadth-first search algorithms. To validate the effectiveness of our work and to evaluate the quality of the generated trusted graph, we conduct many experiments with the real data set from Epinions.com. Our work is the first that focuses on generating small trusted graphs for large online social networks, and we explore the stable and objective information (such as domain) for inferring trust.

Information exchange in virtual communities under extreme disaster conditions

This study proposes a model to examine the mechanism by which social capital contributes to information exchange in virtual communities. A hierarchical model is employed to analyze data from survey and online networks in the context of a major natural disaster. Results suggest that structural capital has a significant effect on cognitive capital, but it has no effect on relational capital. Cognitive capital shows a significant effect on relational capital. This research also finds that structural capital increases information quantity, whereas relational capital and cognitive capital increase information quality. This study reveals the characteristics of online social networks and then proposes socio-technical design principles to address the communication challenges under uncertain emergency.

Measurement and gender-specific analysis of user publishing characteristics on MySpace

Online social networks have become popular platforms for people to make connections, share information, and interact with each other. In an online social network, user publishing activities such as sending messages and posting photos represent online interactions between friends that involve the use of network and system resources. As more and more businesses use online social networks as a means to promote their 'brand names', a good understanding of user publishing characteristics is important not only for capacity planning (server scaling estimation, network bandwidth provisioning, and performance tuning), but also for marketing analysis and security measures of online social networks. Recently there have been many efforts to measure and analyze various characteristics of online social networks. Most of these studies have focused on the network graph properties such as node degree distribution, clustering coefficient, and connected components. In this work, we measure and analyze the gender-specific user publishing characteristics on MySpace. Our results show that there are recognizable patterns with respect to profile attributes, user interactions, temporal usages, and blog contents for users of different genders. In particular, gender neutral profiles (most of them are music bands, TV shows, and other commercial sites) differ significantly from normal male and female profiles for several publishing patterns.