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Vintage and heterogeneity in online social network assembly

Abigail Jacobs

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Date and time:Ìý

Thursday, March 12, 2015 - 2:00pm

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ECCR 257

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Online social networks represent a popular and highly diverse class of social media systems. Each such system begins as a small network that grows and changes as it adds users and connections over time. However, little is known about this process ofÌýonline social network assembly, if different assembly processes produce different structural signatures, and which properties hold across networks of different size and maturity. We investigate these questions using Facebook as a model system. We study a unique dataset of online connections among roughly one million students, faculty, and alumni at the first 100 colleges admitted to Facebook, captured 20 months after its launch. We show that this population of networks is plausibly drawn from a single online assembly process, and that their structure changes in predictable ways as they mature, i.e., as a greater proportion of offline users and connections are sampled. Using complementary data obtained via Internet archaeology, we exploit natural experiments captured by this dataset to characterize how different subnetworks, e.g., among students or among alumni, matured at different rates toward similar end states. These results shed new light on the processes and patterns of online social network assembly, network dynamics and processes in online social systems.