Hot today, gone tomorrow: on the migration of MySpace users

While some empirical studies on Online Social Networks (OSNs) have examined the growth of these systems, little is known about the patterns of decline in user population or user activity (in terms of visiting their OSN account) in large OSNs, mainly because capturing the required information is challenging. In this paper, we examine the evolution of user population and user activity in a popular OSN, namely MySpace. Leveraging more than 360K randomly sampled profiles, we characterize both the pattern of departure and the level of activity among MySpace users. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: (i) A significant fraction of accounts have been deleted and a large fraction of valid accounts have not been visited for more than three months. (ii) One third of public accounts are owned by users who abandon their accounts shortly after creation (i.e., tourists). We leverage this information to estimate the account creation time of other users from their user IDs. (iii) We dem...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SIGCOMM
• Authors: Mojtaba Torkjazi, Reza Rejaie, Walter Willinger
• Keywords: Communications, SIGCOMM 2009, User, User Activity, User Population