Toward Understanding Friendship in Online Social Networks

Abstract

All major on-line social networks, such as MySpace, Face-book, LiveJournal, and Orkut, are built around the conceptof friendship. It is not uncommon for a social network par-ticipant to have over 100 friends. A natural question arises:are they all real friends of hers, or does she mean somethingdifferent when she calls them “friends?” Speaking in otherwords, what is the relationship between off-line (real, tradi-tional) friendship and its on-line (virtual) namesake? In thispaper, we use sociological data to suggest that there is a sig-nificant difference between the concepts of virtual and realfriendships. We further investigate the structure of on-linefriendship and observe that it follows the Pareto (or dou-ble Pareto) distribution and is subject to age stratificationbut not to gender segregation. We introduce the concept ofdigital personality that quantifies the willingness of a socialnetwork participant to engage in virtual friendships.Keywords: Online Social Network, Friend, Overlay, Demo-graphics.