Analyzing the Social Web

Jennifer Golbeck

• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780124058569
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Human-Computer Interaction
• Index: Computer Science

Analyzing the Social Web provides a framework for the analysis of public data currently available and being generated by social networks and social media, like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. Access and analysis of this public data about people and their connections to one another allows for new applications of traditional social network analysis techniques that let us identify things like who are the most important or influential people in a network, how things will spread through the network, and the nature of peoples' relationships. Analyzing the Social Web introduces you to these techniques, shows you their application to many different types of social media, and discusses how social media can be used as a tool for interacting with the online public.

• Presents interactive social applications on the web, and the types of analysis that are currently conducted in the study of social media
• Covers the basics of network structures for beginners, including measuring methods for describing nodes, edges, and parts of the network
• Discusses the major categories of social media applications or phenomena and shows how the techniques presented can be applied to analyze and understand the underlying data
• Provides an introduction to information visualization, particularly network visualization techniques, and methods for using them to identify interesting features in a network, generate hypotheses for analysis, and recognize patterns of behavior
• Includes a supporting website with lecture slides, exercises, and downloadable social network data sets that can be used can be used to apply the techniques presented in the book

Chapter 1

Introduction

Social media has become the dominant method of using the Internet, and it has infiltrated and changed the way millions of people interact and communicate. Social networking in particular has become extremely popular, with over one billion users on Facebook alone and billions more accounts across thousands of social networking sites online.

Understanding social networks has taken on new importance in light of this astounding popularity. Analysis of these social connections and interactions can help us understand who the important people are in a network, what roles a person plays, what subgroups of users are highly interconnected, how things like diseases or rumors will spread through a network, and how users participate.

Applications of these analyses are extensive. Organizations, businesses, users, and content providers can all improve their experience and relationships by analyzing the structure and dynamics of the networks in which they operate.

This chapter will present a history of the social web and an overview of the major types of analysis. For background, the types and details of websites used throughout the book will be covered, as well as some free tools that are useful for visualizing and understanding networks.

Keywords

social media, social web, visualization tools, social networks

Social media has become the dominant method of using the Internet, and it has infiltrated and changed the way millions of people interact and communicate. Social networking in particular has become extremely popular, with over one billion users on Facebook alone and billions more accounts across thousands of social networking sites online.

Understanding social networks—both those explicitly formed on social networking websites and those implicitly formed in many other types of social media—has taken on new importance in light of this astounding popularity. Analysis of these social connections and interactions can help us understand who the important people are in a network, what roles a person plays, what subgroups of users are highly interconnected, how things like diseases or rumors will spread through a network, and how users participate.

Applications of these analyses are extensive. Organizations can prevent or control the spread of disease outbreaks. Websites can support participation and contributions from many types of users. Businesses can provide immediate assistance to customers who have problems or complaints. Users can band together to better understand their communities and government or take collective action. Content providers online can filter and sort information to show users the most relevant, interesting, and trusted content.

The methods for analyzing social networks have been around for decades or longer, but social media provides new challenges and opportunities. Networks online are orders of magnitude larger than the networks analyzed in the past. Often, the networks are simply too big to be analyzed in their entirety. A good social network analyst working with social media needs to know how to analyze the structure of networks, apply sociological principles to understand user behavior, and deal with the size, scope, and application of the networks.

This book is designed to teach the reader a range of social analysis techniques, how to apply them specifically to social media networks, and to illustrate a number of specific social media cases to which the techniques can be applied.

This chapter will present a history of the social web and an overview of the major types of analysis. For background, the types and details of websites used throughout the book will be covered, as well as some free tools that are useful for visualizing and understanding networks.

Analyzing the social web

Classic social network analysis studies a network’s structure. In a social network, a person is considered a node or vertex, and a relationship between people is a link or edge. When all the people and relationships are identified, there are many statistics that can provide insight into the network. However, even before learning those statistics or anything about social network analysis, you can probably identify some important and interesting things in a network.

Consider Figure 1.1. Each circle is a person or node, and each line connecting them is a relationship or edge.

Figure 1.1 A sample social network

What things can you say about this network, without any training in social network analysis? We can see that node a has a lot of relationships. There is a long series of relationships from a to b to b1 to b2 and so on. There are many relationships among the nodes a1 through a10 in the lower right. That might be a group of people with very close relationships.

The first part of this book will introduce formal methods for quantifying these types of insights. This will include measures of a person’s importance, how well connected the people in the network are, and which people form communities or clusters together.

These statistics are frequently used and often provide good insight into the nature of a network. However, those quantitative measures are not the only interesting ways to understand a social network. We will also look at qualitative attributes of the network. Tie strength, which is the strength of the relationship between two people, and trust are two relationship features that have great impact on what happens in a social network. Furthermore, learning what role a person plays in a network by analyzing his or her behavior can link quantitative measures with qualitative analysis to help better understand what goes on in a social group. Visualization, which is the creation images like Figure 1.1 that visually represent the structure of a social network, allows us to leverage our natural abilities to perceive patterns in images to better understand network structure and patterns.

With those analysis methods at hand, the next step is to use them to understand network phenomena. One of the most important of these phenomena is propagation: How do things like information, diseases, or rumors spread in a network? A combination of quantitative and qualitative features inform our understanding of propagation, and another set of analysis techniques is available to study the spread of things through networks.

Throughout the book, we will use real social media networks to demonstrate the techniques described above. But understanding social media goes beyond these types of analysis. The second half of the book will look at specific questions of interest to different types of social media. For example, what motivates people to contribute to Wikipedia? How do politicians leverage social media to spread their messages or communicate with constituents? How do businesses make decisions about when to use social media? What privacy threats do users face in these websites? To answer these questions, we will apply the techniques from the first half of the book and described above, and present the results of research and experiments to show the full range of analysis used to understand the many issues related to social media.

A brief history of the social web

The web was invented in 1991, and from the start, Tim Berners-Lee, its inventor, saw it as a place where people could interact. He called it “a collaborative medium, a place where we all meet and read and write.” At first, authoring web content required people to learn HTML, the language used for all web pages. Putting pages online also required access to a server and some technical knowledge that was a barrier for casual web users.

There were some ways to interact—chat rooms and discussion forums existed even before the web—but overall, the web was a place of static web pages that users simply visited. Blogging began in 1997, and the website Blogger (now owned and operated by Google) went online in 1999. Not only did this allow users to generate content without any knowledge of HTML or other programming languages, but people could comment, thus allowing interaction online. Users could also follow each other’s blogs, which created a social network behind the content.

The first site to launch in the spirit of modern social networking sites was Six Degrees. It went online in 1997 and allowed people to create profiles and list their friends. At the height of its popularity it had one million members.

Blogging and other interactive web technologies continued to grow through the millennium as the dot com era boomed and after the bubble burst. While some sites failed, some current major social media sites emerged. Friendster launched in 2002, which grew quickly and was the first major social networking website. It was followed by LinkedIn (a business-oriented network) and MySpace in 2003. MySpace was the social network that largely brought online social networking into the public consciousness, and it reigned as one of the most popular networks for several years. Facebook followed in 2004. It was first restricted to students at Harvard and a set of elite universities, but eventually expanded to all colleges and then the general public. It is currently the largest social networking website, with over a billion users.

Other social media technologies were coming online as well. In 2004, Flickr, a photo-sharing website, and Digg, a social bookmarking website, launched. YouTube, the video-sharing website, came online in 2005, and Twitter launched in 2006, introducing microblogging to the social media space.

At that point, most of the major technologies of social networking were up and running, but new developments still continued at a dramatic rate. Sites came online and failed every day, and successful sites’ numbers of users grew at a dramatic rate. After the first few years of the millennium, social media was posing a challenge to the dominance of “traditional” web content. User-generated content from blogs, shared links, comments, forum posts, and social media content became more common than any other type of content, prompting Time Life Magazine to declare “You” as the person of the year in 2007.

While Google reigned as the most popular and most-used website for many years, Facebook surpassed it in 2010. Although varying from month to month, social media sites often make up at least half of the top ten most popular websites as tracked by Alexa.¹

Websites discussed

The techniques in this book are not designed for any specific website or type of network; they are general techniques that will work on any network regardless of its source. We will consider networks built from all types of interactions and websites, from email to discussion boards, Facebook-style social networks to blogging, and including offline social networks drawn from people’s behavior and even from literature. However, because the book is focused on social media, a number of popular sites and types of social media occur throughout the text. This section introduces th...