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Hot Today, Gone Tomorrow: On the Migration of MySpace Users

Hot Today, Gone Tomorrow: On the Migration of MySpace Users. Mojtaba Torkjazi † , Reza Rejaie † , Walter Willinger ‡ † University of Oregon ‡ AT&T Labs-Research WOSN’09 Barcelona, Spain. Motivation.

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Hot Today, Gone Tomorrow: On the Migration of MySpace Users

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  1. Hot Today, Gone Tomorrow: On the Migration of MySpace Users Mojtaba Torkjazi†, Reza Rejaie†, Walter Willinger‡ † University of Oregon ‡ AT&T Labs-Research WOSN’09 Barcelona, Spain

  2. Motivation • A majority of empirical studies of Online Social Networks (OSNs) has focused on their associated friendship graphs • What about the temporal dynamics of OSNs? • What about the “active” portion of an OSN? • A majority of empirical studies of OSNs has examined the growth of these systems • What about the patterns of decline in user population? • What about changes over time in user activity? • A majority of empirical studies of OSNs has been based on connectivity information • What about timing information? • How to obtain relevant timing information? WOSN 2009 - Barcelona

  3. Related Work • Characterization of popular OSNs via their friendship graphs • OSN characterization in terms of well-known graph metrics • [Mislove et al.’07, Ahn et al.’07, …] • Examining the evolution of friendship graphs of popular OSNs • OSN evolution in terms of growth metrics and models • [Kumar et al.’06, Leskovec et al,’06, Leskovec et al.’08, …] • Beyond friendship graphs: Activity graphs • Static case (Cyworld) [Chun et al.’08] • It’s all about dynamics! [Willinger et al.09] • User interactions in Facebook [Viswanath et al.’09 – WOSN’09] • User interactions in Flickr [Valafar et al.’09 – WOSN’09] WOSN 2009 - Barcelona

  4. This Study • We examine the evolution of user populationand user activity in MySpace • User arrival/activity/departure, life cycle of MySpace • Why MySpace? • It is one of the largest and most popular OSNs • It provides several features making our study feasible • Main challenges • OSNs are often studied when they are popular and the number of departure is negligible • Popular OSNs tend to hide the information about user departures WOSN 2009 - Barcelona

  5. MySpace Features (I) • Provides explicit profile status • Public • Private • Invalid • Availability of users’ last login • Enables assessment of the level of activity among users • Importantly, allows inference of population growth of MySpace (see later for details) • Global visibility • http://www.myspace.com/user_id 8/17/2009 WOSN 2009 - Barcelona 5

  6. MySpace Features (II) • Monotonic assignment of numeric ID • Searched periodically for currently smallest unassigned ID and checked that all larger IDs are unassigned; after waiting for a short period, we observed that the smallest unassigned ID (and others after it) are now assigned. • Found no apparent patterns in gaps between consecutive invalid IDs • No evidence for re-assignement of deleted IDs • Makes the selection of random samples of MySpace users easy. No visible pattern WOSN 2009 - Barcelona

  7. Measurement • Feb. 26th 2009: MySpace ID space [1 …455,881,700] • 50 parallel samplers to collect 360K users in less than 12 hours (0.1% of MySpace population) • Using HTML parser to post-process the downloaded profiles and extract • User s’ profile status (invalid, public, private) • Users’ last login date • Users’ friend list (only for public profiles) • Unable to parse last login info for 0.96% of public and 0.08% of private profiles • Last login info is not provided or is provided with obvious errors (e.g. 1/1/0001) WOSN 2009 - Barcelona

  8. On the Population size of MySpace • Population of valid MySpace users (Feb. 26, 2009) was about (41.5 + 17.3)% of 455,881,700 = 268M • Compare with www.myspace.com/tom who has 266,029,430 friends(Aug. 13, 2009) • How has MySpace grown during the past years? • How many “active” users are there in MySpace? WOSN 2009 - Barcelona

  9. On User Arrival • What does user ID say about account creation time? • Plot user ID vs. last login of that user for all our users Public users Private users WOSN 2009 - Barcelona

  10. On User Arrival • What does user ID say about account creation time? “Clean edge” = users whose last login is shortly after their account creation time = “MySpace tourists” Tourists • 32% of public and 18% of private users are tourists • Discovery of “tourists” enables accurate estimation of user account creation time based on their associated user ID 8/17/2009 WOSN 2009 - Barcelona 10

  11. On MySpace’s Growth • Estimating the user population of MySpace in the past? • Use the observed uniform spread of tourists across entire ID space • Estimate account creation time by last login time • Estimate account creation time of all sampled accounts based on their ID. April 2008 • Slope of the top line shows the growth rate of MySpace population • Exponential growth until about April 2008 • Visible knee around April 2008 followed by a slow-down in growth WOSN 2009 - Barcelona

  12. On User Activity (I) • How many active users are there in MySpace? • “Active” = login into MySpace within the last 10 days • More than half of public users haven't logged into MySpace in the last 100 days • Less than one third of private users have logged into MySpace in the last 10 days • MySpace has about (15% * 41.4% + 35% * 17.3%) * 445,881,700 = 55M active users. WOSN 2009 - Barcelona

  13. On User Activity (II) • Age of a user in the system vs. level of activity? • More active public users in the first half of the ID space • More inactive private users in the first half of ID space • More med active private & public users in 2nd half of ID space Private users Public users WOSN 2009 - Barcelona

  14. On User Activity (III) • Activity of a user vs. activity of the user’s friends? Public users • No strong correlations in general • Except for the very inactive users who tend to have very inactive friends 8/17/2009 WOSN 2009 - Barcelona 14

  15. On User Departure • Are newer users more likely to leave than older ones? • More public and private profiles in the first half of ID space • More invalid profiles in the second half of ID space • Users joining the system earlier have been more likely to keep their accounts than newer users 8/17/2009 WOSN 2009 - Barcelona 15

  16. MySpace Life Cycle (I) • Possible reasons behind MySpace’s decline? • Slow-down in the growth rate of MySpace is related to emergence of Facebook • Informal evidence (Alexa.com): Daily accesses to Facebook surpassed that of MySpace, at around April 2008 WOSN 2009 - Barcelona

  17. MySpace Life Cycle (II) • Possible causes for users migrating from one OSN to another? • Scalability • System design can’t cope with exponential growth rates? • How to effectively link millions of like-minded users? • Security • The larger the more attractive to hackers and spammers? • More privacy violations and unwanted traffic? • Innovation • In the absence of constant innovation, initial excitement of users fades away? • Is it the case that OSNs become the victim of their own popularity and success? WOSN 2009 - Barcelona

  18. Conclusions • We examine the evolution of user population and user activity in MySpace and we found that • Estimated population of MySpace users with valid accounts is about 268M, of which only about 55M are active users (as of February 26, 2009). • 32% of valid public and 18% of valid private profiles belong to tourists = users with last login shortly after account creation • We exploit the existence of these tourists to estimate the population growth of MySpace since it’s beginning • We observe an exponential initial growth rate for MySpace followed by sudden slow-downaround April 2008. • We speculate about possible reasons for why some OSNs are able to compete and strive in the Internet's OSN eco-system, while others decline and die out. WOSN 2009 - Barcelona

  19. Future Work • What about other OSNs? • Twitter, Flickr, YouTube vs. Facebook • Measurement challenges • Obtaining more/any timing information for user activity • Tracking migrating OSN users • What factors are key for the success /failure of OSNs • Technological, socio-economical, …

  20. Thank You Questions? Website http://mirage.cs.uoregon.edu/OSN Contact for code and data: Mojtaba Torkjazi moji@cs.oregon.edu

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