LineMe: A platform for constructing evolving social networks

Although online social network platforms such as Facebook and WeChat have collected huge amount of online ties, many of the ties do not correspond to real-world (offline) friendships and the amount of online communication between a pair of people does not necessarily quantify the strength of the tie in real-world. Traditionally, real-world strong and weak ties were collected via questionnaires which were not scalable. Can we collect massive offline social ties via online platforms? In this work, we design LineMe, an online website and toolkit which allows users to map their offline friend ties within a group. LineMe is scalable and flexible to handle large-scale and controllable experiments on social networks. We perform an empirical experiment to collect evolving network data in a class of graduates for 4 weeks. LineMe is open to everyone and is now available at http://lime.seeleit.com.

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