Mobile online social network services have seen a rapid increase, in which the huge amount of user-generated social media contents propagating between users via social connections has significantly challenged the traditional content delivery paradigm: First, replicating all of the contents generated by users to edge servers that well "fit" the receivers becomes difficult due to the limited bandwidth and storage capacities. Motivated by device-to-device (D2D) communication that allows users with smart devices to transfer content directly, we propose replicating bandwidth-intensive social contents in a device-to-device manner. Based on large-scale measurement studies on social content propagation and user mobility patterns in edge-network regions, we observe that (1) Device-to-device replication can significantly help users download social contents from nearby neighboring peers; (2) Both social propagation and mobility patterns affect how contents should be replicated; (3) The replication strategies depend on regional characteristics ( e.g. , how users move across regions). Using these measurement insights, we propose a joint content replication strategy for edge-network regions, in which social contents are assigned to users in edge-network regions according to a joint consideration of social graph, content propagation and user mobility. We formulate the replication scheduling as an optimization problem and design distributed algorithm only using historical, local and partial information to solve it. Trace-driven experiments further verify the superiority of our proposal: compared with conventional pure movement-based and popularity-based approach, our design can significantly ( @math times) improve the amount of social contents successfully delivered by device-to-device replication.
@cite_37: Online social network is emerging as a promising alternative for users to directly access video contents. By allowing users to import videos and re-share them through the social connections, a large number of videos are available to users in the online social network. The rapid growth of the user-generated videos provides enormous potential for users to find the ones that interest them; while the convergence of online social network service and online video sharing service makes it possible to perform recommendation using social factors and content factors jointly. In this paper, we design a joint social-content recommendation framework to suggest users which videos to import or re-share in the online social network. In this framework, we first propose a user-content matrix update approach which updates and fills in cold user-video entries to provide the foundations for the recommendation. Then, based on the updated user-content matrix, we construct a joint social-content space to measure the relevance between users and videos, which can provide a high accuracy for video importing and re-sharing recommendation. We conduct experiments using real traces from Tencent Weibo and Youku to verify our algorithm and evaluate its performance. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and show that our approach can substantially improve the recommendation accuracy.
@cite_14: Online social networks (OSNs) have become popular destinations for connecting friends and sharing information. Recent statistics suggest that OSN users regularly share contents from video sites, and a significant amount of requests of the video sites are indeed from them nowadays. These behaviors have substantially changed the workload of online video services. To better understand this paradigm shift, we conduct a long-term and extensive measurement of video sharing in RenRen, the largest Facebook-like OSN in China. In this paper, we focus on the video popularity distribution and evolution. In particular, we find that the video popularity distribution exhibits perfect power-law feature (while videos in YouTube exhibit a power-law waist with a long truncated tail). Moreover, we observe that the requests for the new published videos generally experience two or three days latency to reach the peak value, and then change dynamically with a series of unpredictable bursts (while in YouTube, videos reach the global peak immediately after introduction to the system, and then the accesses generally decrease overtime, except possibly on some special days). These differences can raise new challenges to content providers. For example, the video popularity is now hard to predict based on their historical requests. We further develop a simple yet effective model to simulate user requests process across videos in OSNs. Trace-based simulation shows that it can well capture the observed features.
@cite_33: In information networks where users send messages to one another, the issue of information overload naturally arises: which are the most important messages? In this paper we study the problem of understanding the importance of messages in Twitter. We approach this problem in two stages. First, we perform an extensive characterization of a very large Twitter dataset which includes all users, social relations, and messages posted from the beginning of the service up to August 2009. We show evidence that information overload is present: users sometimes have to search through hundreds of messages to find those that are interesting to reply or retweet. We then identify factors that influence user response or retweet probability: previous responses to the same tweeter, the tweeter's sending rate, the age and some basic text elements of the tweet. In our second stage, we show that some of these factors can be used to improve the presentation order of tweets to the user. First, by inspecting user activity over time, we construct a simple on-off model of user behavior that allows us to infer when a user is actively using Twitter. Then, we explore two methods from machine learning for ranking tweets: a Naive Bayes predictor and a Support Vector Machine classifier. We show that it is possible to reorder tweets to increase the fraction of replied or retweeted messages appearing in the first p positions of the list by as much as 50-60 .
@cite_23: In this paper we investigate the attributes and relative influence of 1.6M Twitter users by tracking 74 million diffusion events that took place on the Twitter follower graph over a two month interval in 2009. Unsurprisingly, we find that the largest cascades tend to be generated by users who have been influential in the past and who have a large number of followers. We also find that URLs that were rated more interesting and or elicited more positive feelings by workers on Mechanical Turk were more likely to spread. In spite of these intuitive results, however, we find that predictions of which particular user or URL will generate large cascades are relatively unreliable. We conclude, therefore, that word-of-mouth diffusion can only be harnessed reliably by targeting large numbers of potential influencers, thereby capturing average effects. Finally, we consider a family of hypothetical marketing strategies, defined by the relative cost of identifying versus compensating potential "influencers." We find that although under some circumstances, the most influential users are also the most cost-effective, under a wide range of plausible assumptions the most cost-effective performance can be realized using "ordinary influencers"---individuals who exert average or even less-than-average influence.
Online social network has greatly changed the content delivery, e.g. , the distribution of social contents is shifted from a central-edge'' manner to an edge-edge'' manner. Bakshy @cite_23 studied the social influence of people in the online social network, and observed that some users can be very influential in social propagation. Li @cite_14 studied the content sharing in the online social network, and observed the skewed popularity distribution of contents and the activity of users. @cite_33 investigated response time of social contents using collected traces, and confirmed the in nature of social media, which motivated our study. In our previous study @cite_37 , we also observed the correlation between social connection and propagation, and users' preferences of content.