IPTPS '01 Revised Papers from the First International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems
Structure and evolution of online social networks
Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
Graph evolution: Densification and shrinking diameters
ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD)
Analysis of topological characteristics of huge online social networking services
Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web
Scale-Free Overlay Topologies with Hard Cutoffs for Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Networks
ICDCS '07 Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems
Measurement and analysis of online social networks
Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities
Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007 workshop on Web mining and social network analysis
Proceedings of the first workshop on Online social networks
Growth of the flickr social network
Proceedings of the first workshop on Online social networks
Power-Law Distributions in Empirical Data
SIAM Review
TwitterRank: finding topic-sensitive influential twitterers
Proceedings of the third ACM international conference on Web search and data mining
What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?
Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web
How do superpeer networks emerge?
INFOCOM'10 Proceedings of the 29th conference on Information communications
Walking in facebook: a case study of unbiased sampling of OSNs
INFOCOM'10 Proceedings of the 29th conference on Information communications
An analysis of social network-based Sybil defenses
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2010 conference
A geometric model for on-line social networks
WOSN'10 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Online social networks
The effects of restrictions on number of connections in OSNs: a case-study on twitter
WOSN'10 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Online social networks
Spammers' networks within online social networks: a case-study on Twitter
Proceedings of the 20th international conference companion on World wide web
Fragile online relationship: a first look at unfollow dynamics in twitter
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Detecting and analyzing automated activity on twitter
PAM'11 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Passive and active measurement
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Online Social Networks (OSNs), which are among the most popular sites on the Web today, are experiencing an exponential rise in the number and activity of users in recent years, leading to problems of scalability and increasing spam. Most OSNs currently impose restrictions on the number of social links that a user can have, in order to reduce strain on the OSN infrastructure and to prevent spammers from linking to large number of users indiscriminately. However, such restrictions are increasingly being criticized for being too prohibitive for socially active and popular users. Hence there is a growing need for the OSN authorities to design restrictions that fulfill their objectives while minimizing user-dissatisfaction; this is evident from the innovative 'soft' cut-off imposed in Twitter instead of the traditional 'hard' cut-offs in other OSNs. In this scenario, the goal of the current work is to develop an analytical framework, taking the restriction in Twitter as a case-study, to aid the design of restrictions which balance the two conflicting objectives of controlling system-load and minimizing user-dissatisfaction. We consequently define a simple utility function for restrictions considering the two objectives, and find that Twitter's policy well balances both. However, we find that the imposed restriction has limited effectiveness in controlling the linking activity of spammers. From a Complex Network Theoretical perspective, this is the first analysis of 'soft' cut-offs in any sort of network, to the best of our knowledge.