Understanding online social network usage from a network perspective

  • Authors:
  • Fabian Schneider;Anja Feldmann;Balachander Krishnamurthy;Walter Willinger

  • Affiliations:
  • TU Berlin and T-Labs, Berlin, Germany;TU Berlin and T-Labs, Berlin, Germany;AT&T Labs - Research, Florham Park, NJ, USA;AT&T Labs - Research, Florham Park, NJ, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference
  • Year:
  • 2009

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have already attracted more than half a billion users. However, our understanding of which OSN features attract and keep the attention of these users is poor. Studies thus far have relied on surveys or interviews of OSN users or focused on static properties, e. g., the friendship graph, gathered via sampled crawls. In this paper, we study how users actually interact with OSNs by extracting clickstreams from passively monitored network traffic. Our characterization of user interactions within the OSN for four different OSNs (Facebook, LinkedIn, Hi5, and StudiVZ) focuses on feature popularity, session characteristics, and the dynamics within OSN sessions. We find, for example, that users commonly spend more than half an hour interacting with the OSNs while the byte contributions per OSN session are relatively small.