Online social networks support users in a wide range of activities, such as sharing information and making recommendations. In Twitter, the hashtag #ff, or #followfriday, arose as a popular convention for users to create contact recommendations for others. Hitherto, there has not been any quantitative study of the effect of such human-generated recommendations. This paper is the first study of a large-scale corpus of human friendship recommendations based on such hashtags, using a large corpus of recommendations gathered over a 24 week period and involving a set of nearly 6 million users. We show that these explicit recommendations have a measurable effect on the process of link creation, increasing the chance of link creation between two and three times on average, compared with a recommendation-free scenario. Also, ties created after such recommendations have up to 6% more longevity than other Twitter ties. Finally, we build a supervised system to rank user-generated recommendations, surfacing the most valuable ones with high precision (0.52 MAP), and we find that features describing users and the relationships between them, are discriminative for this task. © 2013 Springer International Publishing.
CITATION STYLE
Gavilanes, R. G., O’Hare, N., Aiello, L. M., & Jaimes, A. (2013). Follow my friends this Friday! An analysis of human-generated friendship recommendations. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 8238 LNCS, pp. 46–59). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03260-3_5
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