Object Popularity Distributions in Online Social Networks
Theo Lins, Fabr ́ icio Benevenuto · 2012
The extreme popularity of online social networks (OSNs) might have the potential to reshape the Internet traffic in the Future. Unlike traditional Web servers where popular objects are required anywhere, requests to online social networks are dominated by content of local interest, where users typically consume content created by friends. This paper investigates changes in the access patterns of social networks in comparison with traditional Web workloads. Using real data from popular systems like Orkut and YouTube we show that popularity distributions of objects in OSNs is less skewed in comparison with traditional Web servers. This observation suggests that we might need to rethink the strategies currently employed in Web caching systems in view of the growing wave of popularity of social systems.