  Data confidentiality policies at major social network providers have severely
limited researchers' access to large-scale datasets. The biggest impact has
been on the study of network dynamics, where researchers have studied citation
graphs and content-sharing networks, but few have analyzed detailed dynamics in
the massive social networks that dominate the web today. In this paper, we
present results of analyzing detailed dynamics in the Renren social network,
covering a period of 2 years when the network grew from 1 user to 19 million
users and 199 million edges. Rather than validate a single model of network
dynamics, we analyze dynamics at different granularities (user-, community- and
network- wide) to determine how much, if any, users are influenced by dynamics
processes at different scales. We observe in- dependent predictable processes
at each level, and find that while the growth of communities has moderate and
sustained impact on users, significant events such as network merge events have
a strong but short-lived impact that is quickly dominated by the continuous
arrival of new users.
