The identification of intimate friends in personal social network

Nowadays, social network services, such as Twitter and Facebook, are widely being exploited. Many people have participated in social network services to enjoy the communication with their friends and to extend personal social networks. Since it is easy to extend their relations to others, people usually have a large acquaintance list in social network services. In the lists, various users, not only friends but also unfamiliar users such as celebrities, news media, or even unknown users, can be included. Because of large acquaintance lists, it is usually hard to hear from intimate users because of heavy posting from unfamiliar users. So, social network services need to identify intimate friends of users for better services. We propose a new method to identify intimate users in the acquaintance list. This method ranks people in the list based on the amount of communication and common acquaintances. We combine those with weighted parameters, which are experimentally found. It is found that users had a higher satisfaction with our method through experimentations.