Measuring popularity in social network groups

Abstract-As the number of users of social network sitesincreases, the amount of produced information is also increasingat a very fast rate, concerning various types of sharedcontents like messages, photos, videos and even links, as wellas information related to user interactions. Due to this, itbecomes necessary to help users to better filter and selectthe information that will be more useful to them accordingto their personal interests. Social networking environmentstypically promote the organization of their users according togroups of individuals who are related through their commoncharacteristics, interests, and interactions.In this paper we present an approach for assisting the userin the evaluation of popularity of the information shared inthe context of social networking groups, and we propose amodel for measuring the relevance of a user to a group andthe group relevance for its members, based on the popularityand freshness of the contents posted by the users.We describe an architecture supporting the model implementationin the Facebook social network, and we describea Facebook application that collects information concerningthe user groups, and the users activities within the groups.The application offers a simple interface where users canhave access to some statistic values concerning group-relatedrelevance indicators, for example allowing to observe whichare the users who contribute positively to the group activity,and which are the ones that produce less relevant informationor have less activity in a group. We present experimentalresults of our study, and preliminary conclusions regardingthe observation of the behavior of users and groups.