An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, dr liming chen and prof maurice

1. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, dr liming chen and profmauricemulvenna The 4th International Conference on ehealth, 21 – 23 November 2011, malagaspain

2. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna Introduction Rationale & Aim Methodology Results and Discussion Conclusions Limitations and Future Work

3. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna 1. Introduction: epidemiology & Online Social Networking

4. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna Epidemiology • “The study of the distribution and determinants of health-related states or events (including disease)...” [2] • Hippocrates (ca 460 BC – 370 BC) • “The father of Western Medicine” [1]

5. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna Online Social Networking • Internet & Online Social Networking (OSN) • Online social network analysis • Interaction analysis 200 Million Users [3] 800 Million Users [4]

6. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna 2. rationale

7. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn Increased Risk of Social Isolation • Reduced Mobility • Dispersed Networks • Economic Factors

8. Increased Opportunities for Inclusion An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn Opportunities with Online Social Networking A: Sharing of Experiences, Events or Emotions B: Connecting with dispersed networks C: An ability to monitor social activity levels

9. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna Aim • Harness and mine user generated content. • Explore the behaviour and charactersitics of two distinct user groups. • Investigate User Activity • Define individual's interaction metrics • Compare interaction rates of a user / group • Activity Visualisation • Disclose interaction patterns • - who, what, where, when and how users engage

10. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna 3. METHODOLOGY

11. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna Network Selection & Data Collection • Facebook.com rational • Leading OSN in terms of visitor numbers [5] • An observed phenomenon [6] • Accessible data and rich user interactions [7,8] • Data Collection Process • Stage 1: Profile creation • Stage 2: User identification • Stage 3: Data extraction and analysis

12. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna facebook.com User A Log In 1. User B 2. User C 3. User D etc, etc Find Classmates / friends facility Security Access 'Everyone' NO YES 1. User B Wall Profile Info Function Rate Mozilla Firefox generated source view Visual Studio Bespoke Parser - User B results Friend Number User A Export as userb.xml file Data Analysis Active Period architecture

13. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna STAGE 1 – USER Profile Creation

14. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna STAGE 2 – USER identification

15. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna STAGE 3 – data extraction and analysis

16. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna User Analysis STAGE 3b – analysis

17. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna 4. Results and Discussion

18. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna • Measurement Approach: • Function usage total was derived as a sum for each observed activity • Normalisation process carried out to a % of each user's activity • Re-applied to the group as a whole Activity Frequency af = n / (x1 – x2) (activity frequency (af), first date stamp (x1), last date stamp (x2), total number of user activities (n)) • Calculated as a measure of each individual's total activity count. • Used to define the interaction rates of users / groups. • Categorise user behaviours. • G1 Zero, G2 0-4 days, G3 5-9 days, G4 10-19 days and G5 20 days +

19. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna Comment Frequency

20. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna Reply Frequency

21. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna Visualisation – per year

22. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna Visualisation – Activity Level A B C

23. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna Visualisation – Activity Level

24. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna Weekly Scale (Aug 10– Jan 11)

25. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna 5. conclusions

26. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna • Individual user behaviours are now able to be isolated and categorised as distinct characteristics for each user and each group. • Young and older users have distinct characteristics and behaviours that are directly associated to the age of the user. • Young users are high activity and high frequency and older users much less frequent. • As a contemporary approach it is able to now determine behavioural patterns which may be applied to identify health risk factors (e.g. social isolation etc), applied as a preventive approach.  • Learning not just what users say but what these patterns of usage disclose about a population.

27. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna 6. Limitations & Future work

28. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna Limitations • Localised geographical region • Limited data set Future Work • Greater understanding of the behavioural patterns of users • Extension of user metrics, defining and categorising users types • Qualitative assessments to determine the relationship between online and real world user behaviours

29. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna References [1] Strong, W.F.; Cook, John A. (July 2007), "Reviving the Dead Greek Guys", Global Media Journal, Indian Edition, ISSN: 1550-7521 [2] World Health Organisation, Health Topics, Epidemiology. Internet: http://www.who.int/topics/epidemiology/en/ [06 September 2011] [3] “Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey rejoins company”. Internet: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12889048 [06 September 2011] [4] Facebook. Facebook Statisitcs. Internet: www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics [13 October, 2011]. [5] eBizMBA. Top 15 Most Popular Social Networking sites. Internet: www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-networking-websites, October 2011, [13 October, 2011]. [6] K.D. Ala-Mutka et al. “The Impact of Social Computing on the EU Information Society and Economy”. JRC Scientific and Technical Report, EUR 24063 EN Available: http://ipts.jrc.ec.europa.eu/publications/pub.cfm?id=2819 [12 April, 2011]. [7] A. Mislove, B. Viswanath, K. P. Gummadi, and P. Druschel. "You are who you know: Inferring user profiles in online social networks". in Proceedings of WSDM'10, New York, NY, February 2010. [8] K. Lewis, J. Kaufman, M. Gonzalez, A. Wimmer, and N. Christakis. “Tastes, ties, and time: A new social network dataset using Facebook.com,” Social Networks, vol 30, 4, 330-342, October 2008.

30. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna Thank You For Your Time ! Question & Answers Darren Quinn Email: quinn-d15@email.ulster.ac.uk

31. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna Backup Slides

32. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna Data – Age Calculations User Age Information Scenarios: • High School and or University Year* • Date of Birth • No Information Calculation Examples: UID 0012YM, School Year (SY) 2008 **SY – ALA = 1990 (Year of birth) Current Year (2011) - Year of birth (1990) = 21 UID 0012YM, Uni Year (UY) 2008 **UY – ULA = 1986 (Year of birth) Current Year (2011) - Year of birth (1986) = 25 Notes: If both are provided, default to the SY as it is more consistent Discrepancies SY and UY do not equal 4 (Either course is longer or shorter) • 1 Years are taken as leaving years in all cases • 2 Average Leaving Age (ALA)/ University Entry Age (UAE) is 18 • 3 University Leaving Age (ULA) is 22, Degree course length taken as 4 years

33. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna Facebook Statistics 13th October 2011 People on Facebook More than 800 million active users More than 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day Average user has 130 friends Activity on Facebook More than 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages) Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events On average, more than 250 million photos are uploaded per day Global Reach More than 70 languages available on the site More than 75% of users are outside of the United States Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application Platform On average, people on Facebook install apps more than 20 million times every day Every month, more than 500 million people use an app on Facebook or experience Facebook Platform on other websites More than 7 million apps and websites are integrated with Facebook Mobile More than 350 million active users currently access Facebook through their mobile devices More than 475 mobile operators globally work to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products PALO ALTO, Calif. — Jan. 21, 2011 Facebook today announced it has raised U.S.$1.5 billion at a valuation of approximately $50 billion.

34. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna About Facebook Founded in February 2004, Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people's real-world social connections. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment. Product Facebook, the product, is made up of core site functions and applications. Fundamental features to the experience on Facebook are a person’s Home page and Profile. The Home page includes News Feed, a personalized feed of his or her friends updates. The Profile displays information about the individual he or she has chosen to share, including interests, education and work background and contact information. Facebook also includes core applications – Photos, Events, Videos, Groups, and Pages – that let people connect and share in rich and engaging ways. Additionally, people can communicate with one another through Chat, personal messages, Wall posts, Pokes, or Status Updates. Technology Facebook is one of the most-trafficked sites in the world and has had to build infrastructure to support this rapid growth. The company is the largest user in the world of memcached, an open source caching system, and has one of the largest MySQL database clusters anywhere. The site is largely written in PHP though the engineering team developed a way to programmatically transform PHP source code into C++ to gain performance benefits. Facebook has built a lightweight but powerful multi-language RPC framework that seamlessly and easily ties together infrastructure services written in any language, running on any platform. The company has created a custom-built search engine serving millions of queries a day, completely distributed and entirely in-memory, with real-time updates. Facebook relies heavily on open source software and releases large pieces of its own software infrastructure as open source. See http://facebook.com/engineering and http://facebook.com/opensource.

35. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna About Facebook Platform Facebook Platform is a development platform that enables companies and engineers to deeply integrate with the Facebook website and gain access to millions of users through the social graph. Facebook is a part of millions of people’s lives all around the world providing unparalleled distribution potential for applications and the opportunity to build a business that is highly relevant to people’s lives. More information can be found at <http://developers.facebook.com>. Privacy, Safety and Security Facebook has always focused on giving people control over their experience so they can express themselves freely while knowing that their information is being shared in the way they intend. Facebook's privacy policy is TRUSTe certified, and Facebook provides simple and powerful tools that allow people to control what information they share and with whom they share it. More information can be found at http://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation.php. From its beginning, Facebook has worked to provide a safe and trusted environment by, for example, requiring that people use their real names. Facebook also works with online safety experts around the world and has established a global Safety Advisory Board that it consults with on safety issues. More information can be found at http://www.facebook.com/fbsafety and http://www.facebook.com/security. Funding Round one: $500,000 from Peter Thiel, Summer 2004; Round two: $12.7 million from Accel Partners, April 2005; Round three: $27.5 million from Greylock Partners leading the round, Meritech Capital Partners participating, and Accel Partners and Peter Thiel increasing their investment in the company. Board Members: Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, Jim Breyer, Don Graham, Reed Hastings, Erskine Bowles and Peter Thiel; Observer: David Sze; Observer: Paul Madera Employees 2,000+ Users Over 750 million active (users who have returned to the site in the last 30 days) Offices Headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. U.S. offices: Atlanta; Birmingham, Michigan; Chicago; Dallas; Detroit; New York; Venice Beach, Calif.; Washington, DC; Austin International offices: Dublin; Hamburg; Hong Kong; Hyderabad; London; Madrid; Milan; Paris; Selangor; Singapore; Stockholm; Sydney; Tokyo; Toronto;

36. An examination of the behaviour of young and older users of facebook Darren Quinn, DR Liming chen,and prof mauricemulvenna Template