Unveiling Qzone: A measurement study of a large-scale online social network

Nowadays, Online Social Network (OSN) is very important in maintaining relationships and disseminating information. Qzone, as one of the most popular OSNs in China, lacks detailed quantitative measurement and analysis. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to conduct a large-scale measurement on Qzone. Firstly, we develop a dedicated Qzone Crawler System (Qzone-CS) and collect over a billion user and topology data. Subsequently, we measure user behavior and network topology characteristics by analyzing their posting and interactive behaviors. The results show that: 1) the temporal distribution of user behavior follows the periodic distribution, while user posting behavior follows the segmented power-law distribution. Among all the user behaviors on Qzone, the probability of posting Shuoshuo is the highest. Meanwhile, users prefer to comment on others’ blogs than to forward them. Unlike other OSNs, Qzone is a relatively closed system, which is not conducive to the dissemination of information. 2) Qzone is a small-world and scale-free community; the friendship network has higher clustering characteristic compared with the interactive network; out-degree in the interactive network has an obvious correlation with in-degree; and unlike other OSNs, Qzone is a heterogeneous network. Our results can help researchers better understand the user behavior and network topology characteristics of Qzone.