Linking Accounts across Social Networks: the Case of StackOverflow, Github and Twitter

Social Web accommodates a wide spectrum of user activities, including information sharing via social media networks (e.g., Twitter), question answering in collaborative Q&A systems (e.g., StackOverflow), and more profession-oriented activities such as social coding in code sharing systems (e.g., Github). Social Web enables the distinctive opportunity for understanding the interplay between multiple user activity types. To enable such studies, a basic requirement, and a big challenge, is the ability to link user profiles across multiple social networks. By exploiting user attributes, platform-specific services, and different matching strategies, this paper contributes a methodology for linking user accounts across StackOverflow, Github and Twitter. We show how tens of thousands of accounts in StackOverflow, Github, and Twitter could be successfully linked. To showcase the type of research enabled by datasets built with our methodology, we conduct a comparative study of user interaction networks in the three platforms, and investigate correlations between users interactions across the different networks.