The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph
Johan Ugander, Brian Karrer, Lars Backstrom, Cameron Marlow

TL;DR
This paper analyzes Facebook's social graph, revealing its near-complete connectivity, dense local neighborhoods, and demographic-based community structures, providing insights into large-scale social network properties.
Contribution
It offers a comprehensive analysis of Facebook's social graph, highlighting its global connectivity, local density, and demographic assortativity, which were less understood in prior smaller-scale studies.
Findings
99.91% of users in a single connected component
Social neighborhoods are surprisingly dense despite overall sparsity
Clear degree and age-based assortativity patterns
Abstract
We study the structure of the social graph of active Facebook users, the largest social network ever analyzed. We compute numerous features of the graph including the number of users and friendships, the degree distribution, path lengths, clustering, and mixing patterns. Our results center around three main observations. First, we characterize the global structure of the graph, determining that the social network is nearly fully connected, with 99.91% of individuals belonging to a single large connected component, and we confirm the "six degrees of separation" phenomenon on a global scale. Second, by studying the average local clustering coefficient and degeneracy of graph neighborhoods, we show that while the Facebook graph as a whole is clearly sparse, the graph neighborhoods of users contain surprisingly dense structure. Third, we characterize the assortativity patterns present in…
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Taxonomy
TopicsComplex Network Analysis Techniques · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence · Opportunistic and Delay-Tolerant Networks
