Assessing the Availability of Information Transmission in Online Social Networks

Abstract

This paper selects several representative social network services as samples. In order to evaluate how efficiently a system exchanges information before and after the removal of a set of nodes, we introduce the concept of the global efficiency. Especially, comparing with results of the statistic characteristics of different networks, we find that there are some significant differences between two types of structure modes. First, the individual-centered networks have the characteristics of hierarchical structure, but the group-centered networks have not the same structural feature. Second, the individual-centered networks have a higher efficiency than the group-centered networks in information diffusion. Moreover, our research sheds light on the structural properties of networks are responsible for the efficiency and reliability of networks.