A measure of growth of user community in OSNs

Online Social Networks (OSNs) become more and more popular in recent years, with almost several hundred million users involved. A lot of research efforts have been done on features like analysis of the structure of user network, statistics of static properties and dynamic characteristics in OSNs, while little is known about the way how the communities of users grow bigger. This paper proposes a new methodology in OSN research to study the long-run evolution of user community and give guidance for managing network traffic and web caching policy, and a few discussions are also presented.