In the advent of the Internet, web-mediated social networking has become of great influence to Filipinos. Networking sites such as Friendster, YouTube, FaceBook and MySpace are among the most well known sites on the Internet. These sites provide a wide range of services to users from different parts of the world, such as connecting and finding people, as well as, sharing and organizing contents. The popularity and accessibility of these sites enable information to be available. These allow people to analyze and study the characteristics of the population of online social networks. In this study, we developed a computer program to analyze the structural dynamics of a locally popular social networking site: The Friendster Network. Understanding the structural dynamics of a virtual community has many implications, such as finding an improvement on the current networking system, among others. Based on our analysis, we found out that users of the site exhibit preferential attachment to users with high number of friends.
During the time where the network of movie actors have been studied, people have already shown huge interest on the different structural properties such as degree distribution, scale-free and small-world characteristics of networks. This was followed by studies of different kinds of networks like the scientific collaboration and the human sexual contacts networks. However, the studies conducted were based on a small-scale analysis and it is said that the relationships between these kinds of networks differ from that of a normal friend relationship. Just recently, the number of online social networks has significantly increased making it possible to study huge social networks directly. However, it is observed that these huge networks' analysis are more focused on the cultural and business viewpoints only @cite_1 .
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Social networking services are a fast-growing business in the Internet. However, it is unknown if online relationships and their growth patterns are the same as in real-life social networks. In this paper, we compare the structures of three online social networking services: Cyworld, MySpace, and orkut, each with more than 10 million users, respectively. We have access to complete data of Cyworld's ilchon (friend) relationships and analyze its degree distribution, clustering property, degree correlation, and evolution over time. We also use Cyworld data to evaluate the validity of snowball sampling method, which we use to crawl and obtain partial network topologies of MySpace and orkut. Cyworld, the oldest of the three, demonstrates a changing scaling behavior over time in degree distribution. The latest Cyworld data's degree distribution exhibits a multi-scaling behavior, while those of MySpace and orkut have simple scaling behaviors with different exponents. Very interestingly, each of the two e ponents corresponds to the different segments in Cyworld's degree distribution. Certain online social networking services encourage online activities that cannot be easily copied in real life; we show that they deviate from close-knit online social networks which show a similar degree correlation pattern to real-life social networks.