The Effect of Transitive Linking on Information Diffusion in Dynamic Acquaintance Networks

Social media such as Weblog and SNS are useful for information gathering purposes in Web 2.0 era. People visit others´ personal websites with each other and form online social networks of acquaintances. As an efficient active media for information gathering, the social media require any functions for accelerating information diffusion in the online social network. The paper proposes a mechanism of selecting new acquaintances based on transitive linking to form an efficient social network for information gathering. The effect of the mechanism is verified by agent based simulation using a dynamic acquaintance network model.