Measuring and Modeling User Interactions, Growth Mechanisms, and Cascades in Online Social Network based Applications

The growing popularity of Online Social Networks (OSNs) such as Facebook has led to extensive research on OSN friendship graphs. Arguably, however, the worth of an OSN resides in how much *activity* its users generate, rather than simply how connected its users are. It is important to consider general trends in online user engagement, the approaches taken to achieve this engagement, and its effects on the structure of the associated activity graph. We discuss the benefits and shortfalls of our model and its applicability to OSN-based social gaming applications. We will discuss our on-going work on analyzing the adoption tree (or cascades) of OSN-based applications.

Speaker: Chen-Nee Chuah, UC Davis