Project in in765 for Ronny H. Ringen

Network: The friends and acquaintances network on www.orkut.com

Node: A person registered in this system

Link: A friendship/Acquaintance

How I get the needed data: I sent them an email, asking for an anonymized database of their data (They at the moment show this information when I log in; "You are connected to 1565665people through 9friends."). I assume the number 9 is either maximum amount of links to any given person on the network, or more likely, the average.

What this data will tell me: I am hoping that I will be able to compare clustering within countries, and between countries and which countries have a lot of friends abroad, which have very few etc, how this network grew/grows in different countries, what affect gender and or age distribution has on the connectivity of its nodes. Also the frequency of hubs in the network (as an example, my own friends network on orkut, which has at the moment 10 nodes + me (I haven't really used it too much) has a range of people from one registered to have 3 friends, to one with 101, while the average is 25,6.).

Notes: The purpose of this place is basically to be a place for friends to meet, and to make friends. You can only join it if someone who is a member invites you, once you are in, you can connect to other friends you already have there, or whom you make there. If I get the above mentioned database, this should be pretty easy to analyze, if they don't, I would have to modify a spider to collect data. There were also some points you mentioned I should include here when we spoke, but I got distracted, and then I forgot.