User Interactions in Social Networks and their Implications

User Interactions in Social Networks and their ImplicationsChristo Wilson, Bryce Boe, Alessandra Sala, Krishna P. N. Puttaswamy, and Ben Y. ZhaoComputer Science Department, University of California at Santa Barbara{bowlin, bboe, alessandra, krishnap, ravenben}@cs.ucsb.eduAbstract 1. IntroductionSocial networks are popular platforms for interaction, com- Social networks are popular infrastructures for communica-munication and collaboration between friends. Researchers tion, interaction, and information sharing on the Internet.have recently proposed an emerging class of applications Popular social networks such as MySpace and Facebookthat leverage relationships from social networks to improve provide communication, storage and social applications forsecurity and performance in applications such as email, web hundreds of millions of users. Users join, establish socialbrowsing and overlay routing. While these applications of- links to friends, and leverage their social links to share con-ten cite social network connectivity statistics to support their tent, organize events, and search for specific users or shareddesigns, researchers in psychology and sociology have re- resources. These social networks provide platforms for or-peatedly cast doubt on the practice of inferring meaningful ganizing events, user to user communication, and are amongrelationships from social network connections alone. This the Internet’s most popular destinations.leads to the question: ...