An Alternative Explanation for the Rise and Fall of MySpace
Facebook is most prominent social network there is at the moment. However, it wasn’t always. Other social networking sites like MySpace were once widely used. This article uses a model to explain why MySpace is not as famous as it once was. After its peak in 2008, MySpace started to get abandoned by its users. Cannarella and Spechler use a modified version of the SIR model to monitor disease spread to explain what happened. Strong friendship ties are essential in social networks. However, the number of strong friendships as opposed to normal friendships are limited. Onella used a neighbourhood overlap system to define how strong a friendship was between nodes. Using the Barabasi-Albert random graph model, friendships between certain nodes was considered to be strong if this overlap was larger than a certain constant. In the Barabasi-Albert model, nodes with higher values are more likely to get connected to new nodes. This probability is defined by the power law. Using this model, the results showed that after a period of time, strong friendship ties were lost after hitting a peak. This experiment concluded by saying that one of the reasons of the fall of MySpace was because over a period of time, the number of friends left in each person’s networked dropped to too low levels.
This model is different from the ones that we covered in class. To define values for authority and hub scores, we normalized each node’s value over the total. The neighbourhood overlap defined a value of a node in a different way because it is defined as the number of nodes who are neighbours of both A and B divided by number of neighbours of atleast one. This is also normalizing by uses a different total value. The model covered by this article can explain why any social networking website does not stay prominent forever.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.5617v1.pdf