A social network caught in the Web

Lada A. Adamic and Eytan Adar
HP Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA

Orkut Buyukkokten
Google, Mountain View, CA

Abstract
We present an analysis of Club Nexus, an online community at Stanford University. Through the Nexus site we were able to study a reflection of the real world community structure within the student body. We observed and measured social network phenomena such as the small world effect, clustering, and the strength of weak ties. Using the rich profile data provided by the users we were able to deduce the attributes contributing to the formation of friendships, and to determine how the similarity of users decays as the distance between them in the network increases. In addition, we found correlations between a user's personality and their other attributes, as well as interesting correspondences between how users perceive themselves and how they are perceived by others.

Full Paper published in First Monday