composition and structure of a large online social network in the netherlands组成和结构的在线社交网络在荷兰.pdfVIP

Composition and Structure of a Large Online Social Network in the Netherlands Rense Corten* Department of Sociology/ICS, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands Abstract Limitations in data collection have long been an obstacle in research on friendship networks. Most earlier studies use either a sample of ego-networks, or complete network data on a relatively small group (e.g., a single organization). The rise of online social networking services such as Friendster and Facebook, however, provides researchers with opportunities to study friendship networks on a much larger scale. This study uses complete network data from Hyves, a popular online social networking service in the Netherlands, comprising over eight million members and over 400 million online friendship relations. In the first study of its kind for the Netherlands, I examine the structure of this network in terms of the degree distribution, characteristic path length, clustering, and degree assortativity. Results indicate that this network shares features of other large complex networks, but also deviates in other respects. In addition, a comparison with other online social networks shows that these networks show remarkable similarities. Citation: Corten R (2012) Composition and Structure of a Large Online Social Network in the Netherlands. PLoS ONE 7(4): e34760. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0034760 Editor: Attila Szolnoki, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary Received October 19, 2011; Accepted March 6, 2012; Published April 16, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Rense Corten. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This research was supported by a ‘‘