Modeling structure evolution of online social networks

The emergence of online social networks (OSN) has changed the way people interacting with each other, and also inspired new business models on Internet. It is important to understand how a new social network can accumulate user scale quickly especially at its early startup stage. To our knowledge, the problem has not been studied before. In this paper, we focus on the structure evolution of online social networks (OSN) and try to develop mathematical models to describe their evolutions and dynamics, especially at early stages. We present two models. The first one is based on a generative model, following a pure experimental way. The second model is a mathematical one by borrowing ideas from the SIR epidemic model. Experimental results show that our models explains the structure evolution and dynamics of early-stage OSNs very well and provides insights to the key factors of a OSN success.