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MARCO ELIO TABACCHI

Facebook as a Small World: a topological hypothesis

  • Autori: Caci, B; Cardaci, M; Tabacchi, M
  • Anno di pubblicazione: 2012
  • Tipologia: Articolo in rivista (Articolo in rivista)
  • Parole Chiave: Social networks, Facebook, Web 2.0, Small World networks
  • OA Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10447/76022

Abstract

Facebook is becoming a pervasive entity as its social, cultural and media ramifications grow deep and entrenched in our daily life. Its nature of a complex system of interactions, bearing a strong similarity to networks built through individual choices and systems shaped by evolu- tionary pressure, makes it an interesting target for research. Scale-free Small World networks, recently popularized by Barabasi, are a topological class pertaining to both these domains, whose members have resilience to disruption and short intermediate connections between nodes. In this paper we show that the topological structure of a specific subset of Facebook, gathered using data from a self-report online questionnaire on its usage, is similar but measurably different from a scale-free Small World network. We conjecture that the reason for this counterintuitive result lies in the dynamics behind friendship requests. This con- cept may be extendable to the whole network and to other social networks, and is useful to understand Facebook strengths and weaknesses, and to forecast its evolution.