Detecting and Modeling the Structure of a Large-Scale Microblog

Weibo, the most prevalent microblog system in China, has become part of many Chinese’s life. It commands more than 250 million users in 2 years and become the most influential medium in China, but few papers talked about it. The goal of this paper is to study and model the structure of Weibo, which is also less discussed on other online social networks such as Twitter or Facebook. We have developed a dedicated Weibo crawler, which enables us to crawl Weibo’s overlay, and got about 20 million users’ profiles. The results obtained through these data bring important insights into online social networks (OSNs). Specially, our results show Weibo has a core/periphery structure, which is never reported before. Our studies reveal the structure of Weibo, which is valuable for the development of future online social networks.