Abstract:

There are strong ties and weak ties in terms of strength between two nodes in online social networks.The strength of ties can be measured by the relative overlap of two neighboring nodes in the network.Our experimental results show that weak ties- influence on information spreading varies in different online social networks.There is little influence on information diffusion when we remove the weak ties in the information-exchang-oriented online social networks,such as mobile phone communication network and Wiki voting network.The coverage of the information will drop sharply when we remove weak ties in the relationship-oriented online social network,such as YouTube, Facebook and CDBLP cooperation network.  

Key words: social network;weak ties;information diffusion