Look Who I Found: Understanding the Effects of Sharing Curated Friend Groups
Venue
Proceedings of ACM Web Science 2012, ACM, pp. 137-146
Publication Year
2012
Authors
Lujun Fang, Alex Fabrikant, Kristen LeFevre
BibTeX
Abstract
Online social networks like Google+, Twitter, and Facebook allow users to build,
organize, and manage their social connections for the purposes of information
sharing and consumption. Nonetheless, most social network users still report that
building and curating contact groups is a time-consuming burden. To help users
overcome the burdens of contact discovery and grouping, Google+ recently launched a
new feature known as "circle sharing". The feature makes it easy for users to share
the benefits of their own contact curation by sharing entire "circles" (contact
groups) with others. Recipients of a shared circle can adopt the circle as a whole,
merge the circle into one of their own circles, or select specific members of the
circle to add. In this paper, we investigate the impact that circle-sharing has had
on the growth and structure of the Google+ social network. Using a cluster
analysis, we identify two natural categories of shared circles, which represent two
qualitatively different use cases: circles comprised primarily of celebrities
(celebrity circles), and circles comprised of members of a community (community
circles). We observe that exposure to circle-sharing accelerates the rate at which
a user adds others to his or her circles. More specifically, we notice that
circle-sharing has accelerated the "densification" rate of community circles, and
also that it has disproportionately affected users with few connections, allowing
them to find new contacts at a faster rate than would be expected based on accepted
models of network growth. Finally, we identify features that can be used to predict
which of a user’s circles (s)he is most likely to share, thus demonstrating that it
is feasible to suggest to a user which circles to share with friends.
