Characterizing Online Social Networks Orkut

Fabricio Benevenuto, Tiago Rodrigues, Meeyoung Cha, Virgilio Almedia

Presented by Gregory Peaker, Sankalp Kohli

Dataset• Duration & Time of Data

– Is 12 days between March 26 through April 6 2009 representative?• Mid-terms, Finals, Spring Break?

– Is it representing OSN’s?• “Orkut had the largest number of users and

accounted for nearly 98% of all HTTP requests”

– Accidental clicks– Crawl user profiles April 10-17, 2009– Clickstream data March 26-April 6, 2009

Why Social Network Aggregator?• Why Social Network Aggregator?

– Biased users?– “After discarding non-OSN related log

entries, 17% of HTTP requests related to accessing following four OSNs”

– Is this an actual OSN aggregator?– User Interface of aggregator can

influence user behavior• Is this why Orkut accounts 98%

– Data represents 71% from Brazil and 12% from India

– Section 2.1.2 – what is “single visit”?

Data Limitations• Explain the different OSNs better

– “Linkedin is a network used mainly for professional”

– How about orkut, hi5, myspace?• Session

– We know user is connected, but don’t know if actively using OSN or browsing other tab?

– How they measure sessions?• SessionID on server• Leave tab open, and return in hour• Close tab, and return in 10 min

Flaws in Experiment• Section 5.2

– Disregards online social network information provided on home pages• Wall Posts, Comments, News Feeds

• Section 4.1– “browsing accounted for 92% of all

requests”, what is the other 8% of requests• In same paragraph, “number of users who

ever browsed messages was 13 times larger than those who sent messages”

• Section 4.2 – “MySpace showed a different profile from Orkut”