Abstract
This paper investigates how local preferences and social structural constraints might affect the development of the friendship network in Facebook. We do this by analyzing a dataset of an American university, Caltech, and by building an agent-based simulation for comparison. Several different, but plausible, processes of friendship network development are proposed in which the structural information of the growing network and the student preferences are taken into account. ‘Network formation based on personal preference and social structure’ matches the data best, and is thus the preferred hypothesis for the way that students add “friends” on Facebook.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abbas S (2011) Ethnic diversity in Facebook. Technical Report Series of Centre for Policy Modeling, Manchester. Retrieved from http://www.cfpm.org/~ali/FacebookReport/FacebookOnomapGroupReport.pdf
Adamic LA, Buyukkokten O, Adar E (2003) A social network caught in the Web. First Monday 8:1–22
Agarwal A, Chakrabarti S (2007) Learning random walks to rank nodes in graphs. In: Proceedings of the 24th international conference on machine learning—ICML ’07, pp 9–16. doi:10.1145/1273496.1273498
Airoldi EM, Blei DM, Fienberg SE, Xing EP (2008) Mixed membership stochastic blockmodels. J Mach Learn Res 9:1981–2014. Retrieved from http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=3119541&tool=pmcentrez&rendertype=abstract
Backstrom L, Leskovec J (2011) Supervised random walks: predicting and recommending links in social networks. In: Proceedings of the fourth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining, pp 635–644. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1935914
Barabási AL, Albert R (1999) Emergence of scaling in random networks. Science 286(5439):509–512. doi:10.1126/science.286.5439.509
Boyd DM, Ellison NB (2007) Social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship. J Comput-Mediat Commun 13(1):210–230. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x
Caldwell SB (1997) Dynamic microsimulation and the Corsim 3.0 model. In: Strategic forecasting, Ithaca, NY
Clauset A, Shalizi C (2007) Power-law distributions in empirical data. Arxiv preprint arXiv:0706.1062. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/0706.1062
Clauset A, Newman MEJ, Moore C (2004) Finding community structure in very large networks. Phys Rev E, Stat Nonlinear Soft Matter Phys 70(6 Pt 2):066111. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15697438
Dekker A (2007) Realistic social networks for simulation using network rewiring. In: International congress on modelling and simulation. (i), pp 677–683. Retrieved from http://www.mssanz.org.au/MODSIM07/papers/13_s20/RealisticSocial_s20_Dekker_.pdf
Ellison NB, Steinfield C, Lampe C (2007) The benefits of Facebook “friends:” social capital and college students’ use of online social network sites. J Comput-Mediat Commun 12(4):1143–1168. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00367.x
Facebook (2011) Facebook statistics. Retrieved October 13, 2011, from www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
Facebook Key Facts (2012) Facebook. Retrieved June 8, 2012, from http://newsroom.fb.com/content/default.aspx?NewsAreaId=22
Gao B, Liu T, Wei W, Wang T (2011) Semi-supervised ranking on very large graphs with rich metadata. In: Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, vol 49, pp 96–104. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2020430
Gjoka M, Kurant M, Butts C (2009) Unbiased sampling of Facebook. Search, 1–15. Retrieved from http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&btnG=Search&q=intitle:Unbiased+Sampling+of+Facebook#0
Golder SA, Wilkinson D, Huberman BA (2007) Rhythms of social interaction: messaging within a massive online network. Soc Netw 30:330–342. Steinfield C, Pentland B, Lewis AckK et al (eds)
Grimm V, Berger U, Bastiansen F, Eliassen S, Ginot V, Giske J, Goss-Custard J et al (2006) A standard protocol for describing individual-based and agent-based models. Ecol Model 198(1–2):115–126. doi:10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2006.04.023
Hamill L (2010) Communications, travel and social networks since 1840: a study using agent-based models. Soc Netw
Hamill L, Gilbert N (2008) A simple but more realistic agent-based model of a social network. In: Proceedings of European social simulation association annual conference, Brescia, Italy
Jackson MO, Rogers BW (2007) Meeting strangers and friends of friends: how random are social networks? Am Econ Rev 97(3):890–915. doi:10.1257/aer.97.3.890
Kim M (2010) Multiplicative attribute graph model of real-world networks. Algorithms Models Web-Graph 8(1–2):113–160. doi:10.1080/15427951.2012.625257
Krackhardt D, Stern RN (2011) Informal networks and organizational crises: an experimental simulation. Soc Psychol 51(2):123–140
Kumar R, Novak J (2010) Structure and evolution of online social networks. Link Mining Models Algorithms Appl, 337–357. Retrieved from http://www.springerlink.com/index/X246586QW2477685.pdf
Kurant M, Gjoka M, Butts C (2011) Walking on a graph with a magnifying glass: stratified sampling via weighted random walks. ACM SIGMETRICS Perform Eval Rev 39:241–252. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2007145
Lewis K, Kaufman J, Gonzalez M, Wimmer A, Christakis N (2008) Tastes, ties, and time: a new social network dataset using Facebook.com. Soc Netw 30(4):330–342. doi:10.1016/j.socnet.2008.07.002
Macy M (2002) From factors to actors: computational sociology and agent-based modeling. Annual Rev Sociol. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/3069238
Marmaros D, Sacerdote B (2006) How do friendships form? Q J Econ 121(1):79–119. doi:10.1162/003355306776083563
Martin S, Brown W, Klavans R (2011) OpenOrd: an open-source toolbox for large graph layout. In: Conference on visualization, May 2012, vol 7868, p 786806. doi:10.1117/12.871402
Mayer A (2009) Online social networks in economics. Decis Support Syst 47(3):169–184. doi:10.1016/j.dss.2009.02.009
Mayer A, Puller SL (2008) The old boy (and girl) network: social network formation on university campuses. J Public Econ 92:329–347
McPherson M, Smith-Lovin L, Cook JM (2001) Birds of a feather: homophily in social networks. Annu Rev Sociol 27(1):415–444. doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.415
Mislove A, Marcon M, Gummadi KP, Druschel P, Bhattacharjee S, Bhattacharjee B (2007) Measurement and analysis of online social networks. In: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement—IMC ’07, p 29. doi:10.1145/1298306.1298311
Mislove A, Viswanath B, Gummadi KP, Druschel P (2010) You are who you know: inferring user profiles in online social networks. In: Proceedings of the third ACM international conference on Web search and data mining, pp 251–260
Moss S (2008) Alternative approaches to the empirical validation of agent-based. J Artif Soc Soc Simul 1:5
Newman MEJ, Girvan M (2004) Finding and evaluating community structure in networks. Phys Rev E 69(2):026113. doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.69.026113
Opsahl T (2010) Modeling the evolution of continuously-observed networks: communication in a Facebook-like community, pp 1–22. Arxiv preprint arXiv:1010.2141. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.2141
Panzarasa P, Opsahl T, Carley KM (2009) Patterns and dynamics of users’ behavior and interaction: network analysis of an online community. J Am Soc Inf Sci 60(5):911–932. doi:10.1002/asi
Pattison P (1996) Logit models and logistic regressions for social networks. Psychometrika 61(3):401–425. Retrieved from http://www.springerlink.com/index/T2W46715636R2H11.pdf
Pring C (2012). 100 more social media statistics for 2012. Retrieved May 10, 2012, from http://thesocialskinny.com/100-social-media-statistics-for-2012/
Singer HM, Singer I, Herrmann HJ (2009) Agent-based model for friendship in social networks. Phys Rev E, Stat Nonlinear Soft Matter Phys 80(2 Pt 2):026113. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19792206
Snijders TAB (1996) Stochastic actor-oriented models for network change. J Math Sociol 21(1–2):149–172. doi:10.1080/0022250X.1996.9990178
Traud A, Kelsic E, Mucha P (2008) Community structure in online collegiate social networks. Organization, 1–15. Retrieved from http://www.uvm.edu/~pdodds/files/papers/others/2008/traud2008a.pdf
Wilson C, Boe B, Sala A, Puttaswamy KPN, Zhao BY (2009) User interactions in social networks and their implications. In: Proceedings of the fourth ACM European conference on computer systems—EuroSys ’09, p 205. doi:10.1145/1519065.1519089
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my supervisor Bruce Edmonds and my colleague Stefano Picascia, for their comments, guidance and feedback. I am also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their recommendations.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Abbas, S.M.A. An agent-based model of the development of friendship links within Facebook. Comput Math Organ Theory 19, 232–252 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-013-9156-z
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-013-9156-z