Participation in social groups are important but the collective behaviors of
human as a group are difficult to analyze due to the difficulties to quantify
ordinary social relation, group membership, and to collect a comprehensive
dataset. Such difficulties can be circumvented by analyzing online social
networks. In this paper, we analyze a comprehensive dataset obtained from
Tencent QQ, an instant messenger with the highest market share in China.
Specifically, we analyze three derivative networks involving groups and their
members -- the hypergraph of groups, the network of groups and the user network
-- to reveal social interactions at microscopic and mesoscopic level. Our
results uncover interesting behaviors on the growth of user groups, the
interactions between groups, and their relationship with member age and gender.
These findings lead to insights which are difficult to obtain in ordinary
social networks.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figure