| The significant increase in popularity of social networking websites has had a notable effect on patterns of information propagation. Facebook is currently the most popular social network with a projected user base of 800 million accounts by the end of 2011. The introduction of the Facebook Developer Platform has provided third-party developers a way to create and launch their own applications through Facebook. Developers require this data in order to enhance their applications. However, given the lack of academic research on online social networks, there is little information on how these new third-party applications grow geographically over time. Our results will present developers a better way to increase their applications user based on social networks (in this case, Facebook) more rapidly and efficiently. To better understand such patterns, this project has selected an application with over 44 million users and captured and sorted over two billion user activities. We then used this data set to track users activities over geographical locations, identify their friendship clusters, and find the applications growth rate over both time and location. Additionally, to further study online social network applications, we developed a mobile-based carpool application to better explore these initially theoretical studies in real time. |
