Summer 2019

Web Science & Social networks Planetary-Scale Views on a Large Instant-Messaging Network

Professor: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Nejdl Mentor: Philipp Kemkes Student: Masih Ghaderi

2

Top1

Questions:

Is there any specific pattern for human

communication?

Which factors have influence on the way

humans communicate?

Is there any rules in social interaction?

and

How the existing knowledge in Web science

could help us to find the answers?

Web Science

3

Top1

Introduction to social networks

To implement the structure of the human social connections:

Node

Edge

Web Science

Individual

Nodes: 1

Edges: 0

Nodes: 3

Edges: 2

Nodes: 16

Edges: 15 (nodes-1)

4

Top1

Approach

Statistical method to examine characteristics and patterns of large numbers of

people

Actions and characteristics of individuals not being considered

Field of experiment

A communication graph

One month of high-level communication activities using the Microsoft messenger instant-messaging (IM) network

180 million nodes

1.3 billion undirected edges

Structure and communication based on user demographic attributes, such as gender, age, language, and location

Web Science

5

Top1

Dataset structure

Each user is represented by a node

An edge is placed between users who had at least one conversation during the

month of observation

A dataset of 30 billion conversations

240 million distinct users over one month

Users’ Relationship

Strong homophily among users; more and longer

durations conversations with people who are

similar to themselves.

Web Science

6

Top1

Data structure

Split into three parts:

Web Science

Presence data

Communication data

Demographic information

DATA login, logout, first ever

login, add, remove and

block a buddy, invite new

user, change of status

session id, user id, time

joined the session, time

left the session,

messages sent/ received

age, gender, location

(country, ZIP), language,

and IP address

7

Usage & population statistics

Levels of activity

• 242,720,596 users logged into Messenger

• 179,792,538 of them engaged in conversations

Demographic characteristics

• users with reported ages in the 15–35 span of

years are strongly overrepresented

Web Science

8

Top1

Communication demographics

Geography, location, age, and gender influence observed communication

patterns

Communication by age

• Most conversations occur between people

of ages 10 to 20

• people tend to talk to people of similar age

(especially for age groups between 10 and

30 years)

Web Science

9

Top1

Web Science

Older people tend to have

longer conversations (b)

Older people exchange

more messages (c)

Younger people have

faster-paced dialogs (d)

10

Communication by gender

The Messenger population consists of 100 million males and 80 million females

by self-report

Web Science

Conversations occur

50% between male and

female,

40% the same gender

Average conversation length in seconds, Male–male 4,

Female–female 4.5,

Female–male 5 minutes on average

11

Top1

World geography and communication

Using Messenger is very dense in North America, Europe, and Japan, as well as

coastal regions around the world

Web Science

12

Top1

Communication among countries

• Historical and ethnical factors have significant roles (language, culture etc.)

• United States and Spain appear to serve as hubs

Web Science

13

Top1

Communication and geographical distance

• The number of conversations decreases

with distance

• The tendency to communicate with others

within a local context and environment

Web Science

14

p1 Strength of the ties

Removing a few high degree nodes can have a dramatic influence on the

connectivity of a network

Removing users with long conversations is more effective for breaking the

connectivity of the network than for random node deletion

Web Science

15

Planetary-scale social network validates the well-known “6 degrees of

separation”

p1 6 degrees of separation

Earlier study

• A sample of 64 people

• The number of hops for a letter to travel

from Nebraska to Boston

• The average number was 6.2

New study

Randomly sampled 1000 nodes

Calculated for each node the shortest paths to

all other nodes

The average path length is 6.6

Web Science

16

Top1

Conclusion

Until now the biggest scientific study in this field (not technically but scientifically

important)

The communication patterns of all people using a popular IM system

Messenger data gives us a unique opportunity to study distances in the social

network

The core dataset contains more than 30 billion conversations among 240 million

people

The planetary-scale network allowed us to explore dependencies among user

demographics, communication characteristics, and network structure

Cross-gender conversations are both more frequent and of longer duration than

conversations with users of the same reported gender

Validated the earlier research that found “6 degrees of separation” among people

Web Science

17

Thank you