Gaming/Technology
By QMI Agency
Posted 2 days ago
The more people join a social network, the more that network's existing members will use it, a new study shows.
The study, from the City University of Hong Kong, aims to settle the dispute over two opposing theories of social media growth - that online networks grow in a linear fashion, or that they grow in a non-linear fashion.
The linear model suggests that if a person posts on Facebook once a day, that person will continue to do so as more and more people join the site. This theory makes it very easy to predict exactly how much infrastructure a network will need to deal with new users.The non-linear model suggests that people will become more active on social networking sites as they grow in popularity.
People who posted on Facebook once a day when it was new are likely to spend far more time on the site now that it boasts billions of users.
The study reviewed two online networks over time - the Chinese blogging site Sina and a peer-to-peer file-sharing system, Tianwang. The more users that joined each network, the more active existing users became.
The study's authors compared the growth to that of real-world populations - the more people who live somewhere, the more active that population becomes, which explains the difference between bustling cities and quiet rural communities.
The study, published in the journal Physics and Society, not only helps to explain why people feel more compelled to spend time on social networking sites, but also provides a framework for web designers to predict growth and manage infrastructure accordingly.
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