On Notification Importance for Online Social Network Users

Over the last decade, online social networks (OSNs) have been growing quickly to become some of the largest systems in use. Their users are sharing more and more content, and in turn have access to vast amounts of information from and about each other. This increases the risk of information overload for every user. We define a set of event types, which can generate notifications to users on an OSN. We survey one set of users to obtain their evaluation of the relative importance of event types. We survey another set of users, to identify the factors, which influence the perception of the relative importance of event types. Both results are relevant for the design of algorithms for the recommendation of content to OSN users.

Bouraga, S., Jureta, I. and Faulkner, S., 2015. An empirical study of notifications’ importance for online social network users. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 5(1), pp.1-34.