Measuring Popularity in Social Network Groups

As the number of users of social network sites increases, the amount of produced information is also increasing at a very fast rate, concerning various types of shared contents like messages, photos, videos and even links, as well as information related to user interactions. Due to this, it becomes necessary to help users to better filter and select the information that will be more useful to them according to their personal interests. Social networking environments typically promote the organization of their users according to groups of individuals who are related through their common characteristics, interests, and interactions. In this paper we present an approach for assisting the user in the evaluation of popularity of the information shared in the context of social networking groups, and we propose a model for measuring the relevance of a user to a group and the group relevance for its members, based on the popularity and freshness of the contents posted by the users. We describe an architecture supporting the model implementation in the Facebook social network, and we describe a Facebook application that collects information concerning the user groups, and the users activities within the groups. The application offers a simple interface where users can have access to some statistic values concerning group-related relevance indicators, for example allowing to observe the users who contribute positively to the group activity, as well as the ones that produce less relevant information or have less activity in a group. We present experimental results of our study, and preliminary conclusions regarding the observation of the behavior of users and groups.