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Exploring the power of social hub services

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Abstract

Given the diverse focuses of emerging online social networks (OSNs), it is common that a user has signed up on multiple OSNs. Social hub services, a.k.a., social directory services, help each user manage and exhibit her OSN accounts on one webpage. In this work, we conduct a data-driven study by crawling over one million user profiles from about.me, a representative online social hub service. Our study aims at gaining insights on cross-OSN social influence from the crawled data. We first analyze the composition of the social hub users. For each user, we collect her social accounts from her social hub webpage, and aggregate the content generated by these accounts on different OSNs to gain a comprehensive view of this user. According to our analysis, there is a high probability that a user would provide consistent information on different OSNs. We then explore the correlation between user activities on different OSNs, based on which we propose a cross-OSN social influence prediction model. With the model, we can accurately predict a user’s social influence on emerging OSNs, such as Instagram, Foursquare, and Flickr, based on her data published on well-established OSNs like Twitter.

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Notes

  1. https://about.me/gongq/, December 2017.

  2. https://about.me/discover, December 2017.

  3. https://www.alexa.com/topsites/category/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Online_Communities/Social_Networking

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Acknowledgments

This work is sponsored by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61602122, No. 71731004), Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai (No. 16ZR1402200), Shanghai Pujiang Program (No. 16PJ1400700).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

    Qingyuan Gong, Yang Chen, Xiaolong Yu, Chao Xu, Zhichun Guo & Xin Wang

  2. Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

    Qingyuan Gong, Yang Chen, Xiaolong Yu, Chao Xu, Zhichun Guo & Xin Wang

  3. Department of Communications and Networking, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

    Yu Xiao

  4. RISE SICS, Kista, Sweden

    Fehmi Ben Abdesslem

  5. Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Pan Hui

  6. CSE Department, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Pan Hui

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  1. Qingyuan Gong
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  2. Yang Chen
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  3. Xiaolong Yu
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  4. Chao Xu
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  8. Xin Wang
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  9. Pan Hui
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Correspondence to Yang Chen.

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This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Special Issue on Social Computing and Big Data Applications

Guest Editors: Xiaoming Fu, Hong Huang, Gareth Tyson, Lu Zheng, and Gang Wang

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Gong, Q., Chen, Y., Yu, X. et al. Exploring the power of social hub services. World Wide Web 22, 2825–2852 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-018-0633-7

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