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International Conference on Social Informatics

SocInfo 2014: Social Informatics pp 50–65Cite as

The Influence of Indirect Ties on Social Network Dynamics

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 8851))

Abstract

While direct social ties have been intensely studied in the context of computer-mediated social networks, indirect ties (e.g., friends of friends) have seen less attention. Yet in real life, we often rely on friends of our friends for recommendations (of doctors, schools, or babysitters), for introduction to a new job opportunity, and for many other occasional needs. In this work we empirically study the predictive power of indirect ties in two dynamic processes in social networks: new link formation and information diffusion. We not only verify the predictive power of indirect ties in new link formation but also show that this power is effective over longer social distance. Moreover, we show that the strength of an indirect tie positively correlates to the speed of forming a new link between the two end users of the indirect tie. Finally, we show that the strength of indirect ties can serve as a predictor for diffusion paths in social networks.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Florida, FL, USA

    Xiang Zuo & Adriana Iamnitchi

  2. Telefonica Research, Barcelona, Spain

    Jeremy Blackburn

  3. Yahoo Labs, Barcelona, Spain

    Nicolas Kourtellis

  4. Department of Sociology, University of South Florida, FL, USA

    John Skvoretz

Authors
  1. Xiang Zuo
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  2. Jeremy Blackburn
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  3. Nicolas Kourtellis
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  4. John Skvoretz
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  5. Adriana Iamnitchi
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, Spain

    Luca Maria Aiello

  2. Stanford Graduate School of Education, 485 Lasuen Mall, 94305-3096, Stanford, CA, USA

    Daniel McFarland

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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Zuo, X., Blackburn, J., Kourtellis, N., Skvoretz, J., Iamnitchi, A. (2014). The Influence of Indirect Ties on Social Network Dynamics. In: Aiello, L.M., McFarland, D. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8851. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13734-6_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13734-6_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-13733-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-13734-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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