Eur. Phys. J. B 66, 107-113 (2008)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2008-00379-2

Properties of on-line social systems

¹ Central Institute for Labour Protection – National Research Institute, 00-701 Warsaw, Poland
² Institute of Mathematics and Physics, University of Technology and Life Sciences, 85-796 Bydgoszcz, Poland
³ Faculty of Physics, Warsaw University of Technology, 00-662 Warsaw, Poland

Corresponding author: ^a angra@ciop.pl

Received: 20 December 2007
Revised: 20 June 2008
Published online: 27 September 2008

Abstract

We study properties of five different social systems: (i) internet society of friends consisting of over 10⁶ people, (ii) social network consisting of 3 × 10⁴ individuals, who interact in a large virtual world of Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), (iii) over 10⁶ users of music community website, (iv) over 5 × 10⁶ users of gamers community server and (v) over 0.25 × 10⁶ users of books admirer website. Individuals included in large social network form an Internet community and organize themselves in groups of different sizes. The destiny of those systems, as well as the method of creating of new connections, are different, however we found that the properties of these networks are very similar. We have found that the network components size distribution follow the power-law scaling form. In all five systems we have found interesting scaling laws concerning human dynamics. Our research has shown how long people are interested in a single task, how much time they devote to it and how fast they are making friends. It is surprising that the time evolution of an individual connectivity is very similar in each system.