On the impact of users availability in OSNs

Availability of computing resources has been extensively studied in literature with respect to uptime, session lengths and inter-arrival times of hardware devices or software applications. Interestingly enough, information related to the presence of users in online applications has attracted less attention. Consequently, only a few attempts have been made to leverage user availability pattern to improve such applications. Based on an availability trace collected from MySpace, we show in this paper that the online presence of users tends to be correlated to those of their friends. We then show that user availability plays an important role in some algorithms and focus on information spreading. In fact, identifying central users i.e. those located in central positions in a network, is key to achieve a fast dissemination and the importance of users in a social graph precisely vary depending on their availability.

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