Directed Research Project Details

Characterizing User Interactions in Flickr Social Networks

Abstract

Online Social Networking (OSN) services have become increasingly popular over the Internet in recent years. OSNs enable each user to establish friendship with other users, interact with them, post content and view posted content by other users. The popularity of OSNs has motivated researchers to characterize various aspects of these systems. A majority of prior studies have focused on the empirical characterization of the friendship connectivity among users in different OSNs. However, little is known about the pattern of interactions among users due to the difficulty to capture an accurate view of interactions among users.

In this study, we characterize several aspects of fan-owner interactions (i.e. relationship) in a large photo sharing OSN, namely Flickr. We leverage Flickr API to capture interactions between fans and owners of posted photos in two different ways. Using our large datasets, we characterize fan-owner interactions from several angles including: extent of activity among users, reciprocation and locality of interactions, and temporal properties of interactions. Our findings can be summarized as follows: 1- Only a small fraction of users are active, 2- These active users appear to form a core for the interaction graph, 3- A majority of fans of a photo arrive during the first week after it is posted regardless of its popularity or age. Overall , our study provides new insights into the fan-owner interactions among Flickr users.