Exploring the google+ social graph to understand users' communication

Abstract

This work presents a detailed analysis of the Google+ online social network in terms of network characteristics, patterns of utilization around the world and linguistic features among members of different social groups. We identify the key differences and similarities with other popular networks like Facebook and Twitter, in order to determine whether Google+ is a new paradigm or yet another social network. This study is based on two large-scale crawls of million users, that represent virtually the entire network, including public personal information from the profile, list of friends and posts. Compared to other networks, We observe that the average path length between users is slightly higher, possibly because Google+ is a new system where relationships are still rapidly growing. Google+ shows a higher level of reciprocity than Twitter, which also has directed social links. We find that Google+ is popular in countries with relatively low Internet penetration rate. Based on the amount and types of information publicly shared in user profiles, we also find that the notion of privacy varies significantly across different cultures. Our study reveals that groups hold linguistic particularities - such as a tendency to use professional vocabulary, suggesting that Google+ might be employed, by certain users, for professional activities, or that members do not dissociate from their jobs when interacting in this environment. Our findings help to understand not only collective peculiarities of online social media users, but also important characteristics of the textual genre post, being one of the first and most comprehensive studies on this topic.