Attractiveness and activity in Internet communities

Data sets of online communication often take the form of contact sequences—ordered lists contacts (where a contact is defined as a triple of a sender, a recipient and a time). We propose measures of attractiveness and activity for such data sets and analyze these quantities for anonymized contact sequences from an Internet dating community. For this data set the attractiveness and activity measures show broad power-law-like distributions. Our attractiveness and activity measures are more strongly correlated in the real-world data than in our reference model. Effects that indirectly can make active users more attractive are discussed.