Social Interaction in the Flickr Social Network

TL;DR

This study analyzes Flickr's social network to understand favoriting behavior and its influence on network growth, revealing patterns like preferential attachment and rapid reciprocation of favorites.

Contribution

It introduces a two-layer temporal multiplex network model to systematically analyze social interactions and their impact on link formation in Flickr.

Findings

Favoriting follows preferential attachment.

Over 50% of favorites are reciprocated within 10 days.

Favorites lead to follow link formation through multiplex triangle closure.

Abstract

Online social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are among the most popular sites on the Web, providing platforms for sharing information and interacting with a large number of people. The different ways for users to interact, such as liking, retweeting and favoriting user-generated content, are among the defining and extremely popular features of these sites. While empirical studies have been done to learn about the network growth processes in these sites, few studies have focused on social interaction behaviour and the effect of social interaction on network growth. In this paper, we analyze large-scale data collected from the Flickr social network to learn about individual favoriting behaviour and examine the occurrence of link formation after a favorite is created. We do this using a systematic formulation of Flickr as a two-layer temporal multiplex network: the first layer describes the follow relationship between users and the second layer describes the social interaction between users in the form of favorite markings to photos uploaded by them. Our investigation reveals that (a) favoriting is well-described by preferential attachment, (b) over 50% of favorites are reciprocated within 10 days if at all they are reciprocated, (c) different kinds of favorites differ in how fast they are reciprocated, and (d) after a favorite is created, multiplex triangles are closed by the creation of follow links by the favoriter's followers to the favorite receiver.