Social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace allow users to keep in touch with their friends, communicate and share content with them, as well as engage in other multiuser applications. What distinguishes such sites from other, pre-“web 2.0” applications is that users make explicit their social network [2]: who your friends are (and — by omission — who they aren’t) is a constant presence in...

We present a user survey on the use of location-based search in Honduras, a developing country in Latin America. Our goal is to understand the current state of local search and the tasks people are trying to accomplish and gather insights into information seeking behavior. We survey early adopters in the form of students and staff of a university. The results suggest that due to specific charac...

We present a study of information flow that takes into account the observation that an item relevant to one person is more likely to be of interest to individuals in the same social circle than those outside of it. This is due to the fact that the similarity of node attributes in social networks decreases as a function of the graph distance. An epidemic model on a scale-free network with this p...

Much research has been conducted to investigate personality and daily behavior of these only children (“Onlies”) due to the Chinese one-child-per-family policy, and report the singleton generation to be more selfish. As Microblog becomes increasingly popular recently in China, we studied cyber behavior of Onlies and children with siblings (“Others”) on Sina Microblog (“Weibo”), a leading Microb...