What is the Difference between Mobile and Online Social Network?

In recent years, online social network(OSN), emerged as a new medium, has flourished as never before. Meanwhile, constant developments in mobile technology have changed the way people engage in social media. Another kind of social network called mobile social network (MSN) emerges as required and is becoming more and more popular. The goal of this paper is to compare communication behavior in mobile and online social network. We use the Reality Mining data set as a mobile social network sample and Twitter data as an online social network case. We compare communication in three aspects: time, location and topology. Communication in mobile social network presents a more significant periodicity than online social network. Besides, both the reply time and conversation duration in mobile social network are shorter. But the reply rate of most users in mobile social network is between 0.2 to 0.4, while in online social network a larger portion of users have a high reply rate. We also discover that in both social network, the elapsed time during a conversation decrease. Geographic distance influence mobile social network and online social network differently. Communication in online social network is less location-sensitive than mobile social network. User communication in mobile social network is in better accordance with social theories, whereas in online social network it performs inconsistently. To the best of our knowledge this work is the first quantitative communication comparison between mobile and online social network.