Mining knowledge-sharing sites for viral marketing
Proceedings of the eighth ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
The Wisdom of Crowds
Mining Social Networks for Targeted Advertising
HICSS '06 Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - Volume 06
Group formation in large social networks: membership, growth, and evolution
Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
Analysis of topological characteristics of huge online social networking services
Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web
iLink: search and routing in social networks
Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
Measurement and analysis of online social networks
Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
Planetary-scale views on a large instant-messaging network
Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web
A measurement-driven analysis of information propagation in the flickr social network
Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web
Characterizing user behavior in online social networks
Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference
Analyzing the video popularity characteristics of large-scale user generated content systems
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
Predicting the popularity of online content
Communications of the ACM
Are friends overrated?: a study for the social aggregator digg.com
NETWORKING'11 Proceedings of the 10th international IFIP TC 6 conference on Networking - Volume Part II
Assessing the impact of the social network on marking photos as favorites in flickr
Proceedings of the 18th Brazilian symposium on Multimedia and the web
Metric convergence in social network sampling
Proceedings of the 5th ACM workshop on HotPlanet
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The key feature of online social networks (OSN) is the ability of users to become active, make friends and interact via comments, videos or messages with those around them. This social interaction is typically perceived as critical to the proper functioning of these platforms; therefore, a significant share of OSN research in the recent past has investigated the characteristics and importance of these social links, studying the networks' friendship relations through their topological properties, the structure of the resulting communities and identifying the role and importance of individual members within these networks. In this paper, we present results from a multi-year study of the online social network Digg.com, indicating that the importance of friends and the friend network in the propagation of information is less than originally perceived. While we do note that users form and maintain a social structure along which information is exchanged, the importance of these links and their contribution is very low: users with even a nearly identical overlap in interests react on average only with a probability of 2% to information propagated and received from friends. Furthermore, in only about 50% of stories that became popular from the entire body of 10 million news we find evidence that the social ties among users were a critical ingredient to the successful spread. Our findings indicate the presence of previously unconsidered factors, the temporal alignment between user activities and the existence of additional logical relationships beyond the topology of the social graph, that are able to drive and steer the dynamics of such OSNs.