Experiences Using BDS: A Crawler for Social Internetworking Scenarios

In new generation social networks, we expect that the paradigm of Social Internetworking Scenarios (SISs) will be more and more important. In this new scenario, the role of Social Network Analysis is of course still crucial but the preliminary step to do is designing a good way to crawl the underlying graph. While this aspect has been deeply investigated in the field of social networks, it is an open issue when moving towards SISs. Indeed, we cannot expect that a crawling strategy, good for social networks, is still valid in a Social Internetworking scenario, due to the specific topological features of this scenario. In this paper, we first confirm the above claim and then, define a new crawling strategy specifically conceived for SISs, which overcomes the drawbacks of the state-of-the-art crawling strategies. After this, we exploit this crawling strategy to investigate SISs to understand their main properties and features of their main actors (i.e., bridges).