Building E - Room 2
June 22nd, 2011 - 12.00 noon

Haewoon Kwak - KAIST, Korea

Directionality in Online Relationships: How different is Twitter?

In the past decade online social networking services, such as Myspace
and Facebook, have dramatically changed how we spend time online,
stay connected with friends and search for information. All the
activities are based on online relationships called ’friends’. These
relationships are com- monly bidirectional; one requests and the other
accepts. The friend networks based on mutual relationship have shown
very social topological characteristics, such as assortativity. Not
all online relationships are bidirectional. The friend relationship in
Twitter, known as follow, is directed. People can follow any other
person without an approval. This one-sided relationship has not
received much attention so far mainly due to the absence of such
functionality. In this article we show novel aspects of Twitter that
come from the directed relationships: topological char- acteristics of
the directed network, word-of-mouth information spreading via retweet, and online relationship dissolution.

Bio

Haewoon Kwak took his BS in Computer Science from KAIST, Korea in
February of 2006.
He graduated MS also in Computer Science, KAIST in 2007 and will
graduate PhD this summer.
His PhD focused on a multi-level analysis of structures and dynamics
of online social networks.
With physicists and sociologists, he have studied user behavior in
online social networks.