Ranking Users Based on Influence in a Directional Social Network

This paper describes the preliminary work on a study that ranks users in a directional social network by their influence during a particular time period. Our method considers a user with high influence to be one who has a high ratio of forwarded messages to the number of messages she posts. After implementing our influence ranking program, we plan to compare our method with others in the literature. This comparison will evaluate the similarity of the lists of influential users that are generated by these different methods. We will also evaluate the ease of use and time required by each of the influence calculation methods.