New kid on the block

Abstract

This paper presents a detailed analysis of the Google+ social network. We identify the key differences and similarities with other popular networks like Facebook and Twitter, in order to determine whether Google+ is a new paradigm or yet another social network. This work is based on large-scale crawls of over 27 million user profiles that represented nearly 50% of the entire network in 2011. We observe that the average path length between users is slightly higher than other networks, possibly because Google+ is a new system where relationships are still rapidly growing. Google+ shows a higher level of reciprocity than Twitter, which also has directed social links. The newly available "places lived" field could be used to study how users are distributed around the world and how aggressively the service has been adopted in different countries. We find that Google+ is popular in countries with relatively low Internet penetration rate. Based on the amount and types of information publicly shared in user profiles, we also find that the notion of privacy varies significantly across different cultures.