An empirical examination of the sustainability of social bookmarking websites |
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Authors: | Raquel Benbunan-Fich Marios Koufaris |
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Affiliation: | (1) Department of Statistics and Computer Information Systems, Baruch College, City University of New York, 55 Lexington Ave., Box B11-220, New York, NY 10010, USA |
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Abstract: | Given the continuous growth of social bookmarking sites, we investigated the reasons behind their sustainability as online social structures. Bookmarking sites offer users the option to post and tag web resources privately or to make them publicly available to other users of the sites. A prevalence of private tagging would threaten the sustainability of the social aspects at these sites. Using activity data from a sample of 1,000 users of Simpy, a popular social bookmarking site, we found that the majority of users contribute most of their tagged resources to the public repository, despite the option to keep them private. We also found that in social bookmarking sites there is a minority of extremely prolific contributors who are responsible for a large portion of public tagged resources. Finally, we found that new users make larger proportions of their contributions public than existing users and that there is a larger number of regular contributors to the site than irregular ones. All of these findings are consistent with the mechanisms predicted by a theoretical model of sustainable online social structures. |
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