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08391 Group Summary – The Berners-Lee Hypothesis: Power laws and Group Structure in Flickr Baldassarri, Andrea Barrat, Alain Capocci, Andrea Halpin, Harry Lehner, Ulrike Ramasco, Jose Robu, Valentin Taraborelli, Dario Social group flickr powerlaw An intriguing hypothesis, first suggested by Tim Berners-Lee, is that the structure of online groups should conform to a power law distribution. We relate this hypothesis to earlier work around the Dunbar Number, which is a supposed limit to the number of social contacts a user can have in a group. As preliminary results, we show that the number of contacts of a typical Flickr user, the number of groups a user belongs to, and the size of Flickr groups all follow power law distributions. Furthermore, we find some unexpected differences in the internal structure of public and private Flickr groups. For further research, we further operationalize the Berners-Lee hypothesis to suppose that users with a group membership distribution that follows a power law will produce more content for social Web systems. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Andrea Baldassarri and Alain Barrat and Andrea Capocci and Harry Halpin and Ulrike Lehner and Jose Ramasco and Valentin Robu and Dario Taraborelli 2008 Is Part Of Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings, Volume 8391, Social Web Communities (2008) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/DagSemProc.08391.4 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-17893 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/DagSemProc.08391.4 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode