A Social Network Caught in the Web

A social network caught in the Web is reaserch paper on the study of a real world social network within a community web site. The authors studied the behavior and interactions (e.g. how personality and interests influence one’s choice of friends) among the members of the Club Nexus at Stanford University.

Small World Phenomenon:
In analyzing the social network we observered a small world effect, where the distance between any two users, measured in the number of hops along the Nexus Net, is only 4 on average. This average might at first seem low in view of the fact that Club Nexus represents a diverse group of users, both undergraduates and graduates at various stages in their studies representing many departments. The is the counterintuitive aspect of the small world phenomenon; individuals tend to socialize in smaller cliques, often determined by factors such as year in school, department or dorm, yet any two user are seperated by only a small number of hops.

Conclusion:
Our analysis was able to detect many expected trends (e.g. English majors liking to spend their free time reading or people sharing a narrow or unusual interested becoming friends), while at the same time finding non-obvious relationships (e.g. “responsible” people being perceived as slightly less “cool”). What makes Club Nexus special is that one is able to observe these patterns on a large scale with many different variables