Sina Weibo, which was launched in 2009, is the most popular Chinese
micro-blogging service. It has been reported that Sina Weibo has more than 400
million registered users by the end of the third quarter in 2012. Sina Weibo
and Twitter have a lot in common, however, in terms of the following
preference, Sina Weibo users, most of whom are Chinese, behave differently
compared with those of Twitter.
This work is based on a data set of Sina Weibo which contains 80.8 million
users' profiles and 7.2 billion relations and a large data set of Twitter.
Firstly some basic features of Sina Weibo and Twitter are analyzed such as
degree and activeness distribution, correlation between degree and activeness,
and the degree of separation. Then the following preference is investigated by
studying the assortative mixing, friend similarities, following distribution,
edge balance ratio, and ranking correlation, where edge balance ratio is newly
proposed to measure balance property of graphs. It is found that Sina Weibo has
a lower reciprocity rate, more positive balanced relations and is more
disassortative. Coinciding with Asian traditional culture, the following
preference of Sina Weibo users is more concentrated and hierarchical: they are
more likely to follow people at higher or the same social levels and less
likely to follow people lower than themselves. In contrast, the same kind of
following preference is weaker in Twitter. Twitter users are open as they
follow people from levels, which accords with its global characteristic and the
prevalence of western civilization. The message forwarding behavior is studied
by displaying the propagation levels, delays, and critical users. The following
preference derives from not only the usage habits but also underlying reasons
such as personalities and social moralities that is worthy of future research.Comment: 9 pages, 13 figure