[Air-L] How many new Facebook friendships per month? Year? Has anyone got data on this?

[Felix Muench]

Hi Nik,

I’m not aware of any data regarding Facebook on that. I’m pretty sure too that this will only be available from and for researchers working for or closely with Facebook (so I would look for resources from Facebook that might allow you to infer approximate numbers). Also, I would not necessarily expect that there is a typical evolution over time as social circles will increase suddenly with major life events (new partner, moving town, switching jobs, etc.). So it will be hard to put a number on it. In the beginning though it should exhibit something like a logistic growth curve.

I don’t know whether this helps but here are some references that are at least tangential to your question:

  *   This is one of the most comprehensive large-scale analyses I’ve seen so far on Facebook. Unfortunately though, it’s already 6 years old and much has changed during that time. Maybe try to hunt down more recent publications by the authors:

     *   Ugander, J., Karrer, B., Backstrom, L., & Marlow, C. (2011). The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph, 1–17. http://doi.org/10.1.1.31.1768
  *   This one is not about Facebook, but investigates the growth of the ego-networks of new Twitter users over time and bears some interesting hypotheses about how it becomes a social network after starting out more as an informational one (in line with my statement above, the guys having done this research have been affiliated with Twitter at the time of the study):

     *   Myers, S. A., Sharma, A., Gupta, P., & Lin, J. (2014). Information network or social network? The structure of the Twitter follow graph. WWW’14 Companion, 493–498. http://doi.org/10.1145/2567948.2576939

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Felix



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On 22 June 2017 at 7:04:01 pm, Nicholas John (n.john at huji.ac.il<mailto:n.john at huji.ac.il>) wrote:

Hi all,
I really need to know how many new Facebook friendships people make per week, month, year, or whatever unit of time data are available for.
I imagine that new users make lots all at once, and that then it flattens out, but I’ve got no idea on average how many new Facebook ties are made by people every month or whatever.
Does anyone know? Has anyone seen data on this anywhere?
Thanks in advance,
Nik



Nicholas John
Department of Communication
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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