Who are active? An in-depth measurement on user activity characteristics in sina microblogging

The emergence of online social network has changed the Internet users' online behaviors dramatically. Microblog, as an emerging online social network service, has attracted hundreds of millions of users to produce and share all kinds of content since its foundation. How to improve the Quality of Experience of the service and keep the users' passions for participant has become one of the most important problems confronted by the quick development of microblogging services. On the other hand, the QoE of a service influences and is influenced by its users' activities. In this paper, we analyzed the users' activities in Sina Weibo, a popular Chinese microblog website which has a profound influence on Chinese netizens. With the aim to find possible ways to improve users' Quality of Experience, we conduct a research to gain an in-depth understanding of what kinds of users are more active and what kinds of content are favored most. When we compare the distributions of the degrees of followers, we find Sina Weibo is still younger than Twitter, a famous worldwide microblogging service. Based on the following analysis, we find that users with around 300 friends in SinaWeibo are the most active users, which we believe is consistent with the Dunbar number. Furthermore, we find users in Sina Weibo are very keen on the content embedded with images and videos, which make up the majority of retweeted tweets. Through the analysis results, we confirm that inspiring users to follow others and improving the renderings of images and videos are the basic ways to improve the Quality of Experience.