Most existing measurement and analysis projects
are led by either academic groups or ISPs, without
the active involvement of OSN service providers.
Such a situation limits the insight of the
study. On one hand, academic researchers always
use extensive crawling to obtain the data, which
encounters many restrictions from the OSN providers,
such as traffic control (how many messages
per IP and/or per account can be fetched
in one hour). Also, some users may use privacy
options to make their data unavailable. Last but
not least, the huge number of users makes it
almost impossible to get a timely snapshot, so
data consistency cannot be guaranteed. On the
other hand, although an ISP is able to capture
and analyze all its traffic to/from an OSN site
through traffic monitoring, it can only get a partial
view of the whole site; that is, only users who
get access to OSNs through a specific ISP’s
infrastructure can be observed. As we have discussed,
user behavior study can be beneficial for
OSN providers themselves. We envision that
OSN providers can collaborate with academia
and industrial researchers in order to understand
user behavior in an insightful way. This can
enhance the user experience interactively and
quickly. Also, this will save operational costs for
OSN providers.