Predicting tie strength with social media
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Modeling relationship strength in online social networks
Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web
I rate you. you rate me. should we do so publicly?
WOSN'10 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Online social networks
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Each user of the MySpace social network can designate a small subset of her friends as Top Friends, placing them in a rank-ordered list displayed prominently on her profile. By examining users' #1 (best) and #2 (second-best) friends, we discover that MySpace users are nearly indifferent to these two friends' popularities when choosing which to designate as their best friend. Other pairs of ranks (e.g., #1-vs.-#3, #2-vs.-#3, ...) also reveal no marked preference for a popular friend over a less popular one. To the extent that ranking decisions form a window into broader decisions about whom to befriend at all, these observations suggest that positing individuals' tendency to attach to popular people---as in network-growth models like preferential attachment---may not suffice to explain the heavy-tailed degree distributions seen in real networks.