Indifferent attachment: The role of degree in ranking friends

Each user of the MySpace social network can designate a small subset of her friends as Top Friends, placing them in a rank-ordered list displayed prominently on her profile. By examining users´ #1 (best) and #2 (second-best) friends, we discover that MySpace users are nearly indifferent to these two friends´ popularities when choosing which to designate as their best friend. Other pairs of ranks (e.g., #1-vs.-#3, #2-vs.-#3, ...) also reveal no marked preference for a popular friend over a less popular one. To the extent that ranking decisions form a window into broader decisions about whom to befriend at all, these observations suggest that positing individuals´ tendency to attach to popular people-as in network-growth models like preferential attachment-may not suffice to explain the heavy-tailed degree distributions seen in real networks.