Modeling Socialness in Dynamic Social Networks

Socialness refers to the ability to elicit social interaction and social links among people. It is a concept often associated with individuals. Although there are tangible benefits in socialness, there is little research in its modeling. In this paper, we study socialness as a property that can be associated with items, beyond its traditional association with people. We aim to model an item's socialness as a quantitative measure based on the how popular the item is adopted by members of multiple communities. We propose two socialness models, namely Basic and Mutual Dependency, to compute item socialness based on different sets of principles. In developing the Mutual Dependency Model, we demonstrate that items' socialness can be related to the socialness of communities. Our model have been evaluated on a set of users and application items from a mobile social network. We also conducted experiments to study how socialness can be related to network effects such as homophily, social influence and friendship formation.