Anirban Mahanti

"Characterization of an Online Social Aggregation Service"

(Institutkolloguium am Max Planck Institut für Software-Systeme)

Many Web users have accounts with multiple different social networking services. This has prompted development of services that aggregate information available through various services. This talk will consider one such aggregation service, FriendFeed. The first part of the talk will consider questions such as what types of services users aggregate content from, the relative popularity of services, who follows the aggregated feeds, and why. The second part of the talk will focus on factors such as proximity, common interests, time spent in the system, and combinations thereof, and their influence in link formation. Results based on data collected from FriendFeed between September 2008 and May 2009 will be presented. This talk is based on joint work with Martin Arlitt (HP Labs/University of Calgary), Niklas Carlsson (University of Calgary), Sanchit Garg (IIT Delhi), and Trinabh Gupta (IIT Delhi).

Bio: Anirban Mahanti is a Senior Researcher at NICTA, Australia. He holds a B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology (at Mesra), India, and a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. His research interests include network measurement, TCP/IP protocols, performance evaluation, and distributed systems.