Characterization of an Online Social Aggregation Service
Anirban Mahanti
NICTA
SWS Colloquium
Anirban Mahanti is a Senior Researcher at NICTA, Australia.
He holds a B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from
the Birla Institute of Technology (at Mesra), India, and
a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the
University of Saskatchewan, Canada. His research interests
include network measurement, TCP/IP protocols,
performance evaluation, and distributed systems
Many Web users have accounts with multiple different social
networking services. This has prompted development
of services that aggregate information available through various
services. This talk will consider one such aggregation service,
FriendFeed. The first part of the talk will consider questions
such as what types of services users aggregate content from, the relative
popularity of services, who follows the aggregated feeds, and why.
The second part of the talk will focus on factors such as proximity,
common interests, time spent in the system, and combinations
thereof, and their influence in link formation. Results based on
data collected from FriendFeed between September 2008
and May 2009 will be presented. This talk is based on joint
work with Martin Arlitt (HP Labs/University of Calgary),
Niklas Carlsson (University of Calgary), Sanchit Garg (IIT Delhi),
and Trinabh Gupta (IIT Delhi).