Bridge analysis in a Social Internetworking Scenario

The rapid development of the number and the size of Online Social Networks (OSNs) makes the analysis of Social Internetworking Scenarios (SISs) extremely challenging. In a SIS, a user can join multiple OSNs and two users can interact with each other even though they joined different OSNs and did not know each other. While OSNs have been extensively studied in the last years, the most peculiar aspects of Social Internetworking Scenarios have not been yet investigated, especially from the Social Network Analysis perspective. Our paper tries to give a first important contribution in this field by deeply studying the core elements of a SIS, i.e., bridges. Bridges are those users who joined more OSNs and allow users of different OSNs to cooperate. We investigate the main features of this category of users by means of a Social Network Analysis campaign. In particular;we define several specific crawling strategies and extract several samples from a SIS by applying each of them. The experimental results define a clear identikit of bridges allowing us to state a number of non-trivial conclusions about their role in a SIS. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.