A Study of Offline Events and Its Influence on Online Social Connections in Douban

Social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook and Twitter are popular for finding, promoting and attending offline events like meetings, concerts and parties. Much work has looked into characterizing these social networks and their user behavior, but less has been explored about the events. With the emergence of event and activity-based applications such as Facebook Events, Google+ Events, EventBrite, Meet up, and Douban Events (a similar service in China), we can connect with other people online and meet them offline. In this paper, we study the user behavior around people attending offline events which are promoted online using Douban. We present results around the event properties, user behavior around the event, and social influence to an event. Our results show that event distribution by participants and wishers follow the typical power-law distribution of social networks, most users attend or like short events that last several days, and that there is an exponential relationship between follow probability and number of common events attended between two users and a linear relationship for common events interested in. All these findings can ultimately help to provide a better understanding on how SNS could affect user behavior in events, and provide guidelines on how to improve the design of event-based applications, particularly for mobile social network services.