2012/05/25 by Roberto Gonzalez, Roberto González, Gonzalez, Roberto +10 · 1 voice
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Caching and Content Delivery #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) #cs.NI #cs.SI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1205.5662
WWW 2013
openalex publication_date 2012/05/25 · arxiv published 2012/05/25 · arxiv created 2013/03/26 · arxiv updated 2013/03/27 · openalex created_date 2019/06/27 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In the era when Facebook and Twitter dominate the market for social media, Google has introduced Google+ (G+) and reported a significant growth in its size while others called it a ghost town. This begs the question that "whether G+ can really attract a significant number of connected and active users despite the dominance of Facebook and Twitter?". This paper tackles the above question by presenting a detailed characterization of G+ based on large scale measurements. We identify the main components of G+ structure, characterize the key features of their users and their evolution over time. We then conduct detailed analysis on the evolution of connectivity and activity among users in the largest connected component (LCC) of G+ structure, and compare their characteristics with other major OSNs. We show that despite the dramatic growth in the size of G+, the relative size of LCC has been decreasing and its connectivity has become less clustered. While the aggregate user activity has gradually increased, only a very small fraction of users exhibit any type of activity. To our knowledge, our study offers the most comprehensive characterization of G+ based on the largest collected data sets.