YouTube (v2) Friendship Network
A YouTube (friendship network) dataset of 1,138,499 users and 2,990,443 friendship edges, collected by Tang & Liu via YouTube crawl (2009). Each record contains user-user friendship edges, group memberships (47 groups), and user IDs. The dataset is notable for its classic social network dataset with explicit group memberships, used as a benchmark for latent social dimensions and collective behavior learning. Intended for research into social network analysis, community detection, group membership prediction, and relational learning in social media.
Cite this dataset at
youtube-v2.echo.directory
Analytics
The full graph has 1,138,499 nodes; this view shows the 1,000-node sample the pipeline drew for display. Node size is centrality, colour is community.
Computed over the full corpus.
Record
- Catalog key
youtube-v2- Authors
- Tang, Lei; Liu, Huan
- Year
- 2009
- Source paper
- Relational Learning via Latent Social Dimensions
- DOI / arXiv
- 10.1145/1557019.1557109
- License
- Academic Use (see Syracuse Data Lab terms) (LicenseRef-Research-Only)
- Records
- 1,138,499
- Nodes
- 1,138,499
- Edges
- 2,990,443
- Nodes are
- user
- Edges are
- friendship
- Attributes
- nodes have attributes; edges have no attributes
- Languages
- en
- Collected
- 2009 (2000s)
- Tasks
- From the graph: link prediction, community detection
- Region
- Global (inferred: the platform is used worldwide)
Provenance
- Originally published at
- https://datasets.syr.edu link checked
- Hosted copy
- Mirrored on echo.directory on 2026-10-09, 45.0 MB across 5 files. Checksums in MANIFEST.json.
Citations
Relational learning via latent social dimensions
Lei Tang, Huan Liu
Journal Article · Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining · 2009
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Citation data from Semantic Scholar, retrieved 2026-10-19.
How to cite
BibTeX
@misc{echo2026,
title = {ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online},
author = {Switzer, Braden and Zafarani, Reza},
year = {2026},
url = {https://echo.directory},
note = {Syracuse University}
}
@inproceedings{tang2009relational,
title = {{Relational Learning via Latent Social Dimensions}},
author = {Tang, Lei and Liu, Huan},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'09)},
pages = {817--826},
year = {2009},
doi = {10.1145/1557019.1557109}
} APA
Switzer, B., & Zafarani, R. (2026). ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online [Data repository]. Syracuse University. https://echo.directory
Tang, L., & Liu, H. (2009). YouTube (v2) Friendship Network [Data set]. https://doi.org/10.1145/1557019.1557109
MLA
Switzer, Braden, and Reza Zafarani. ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online. Syracuse University, 2026, echo.directory.
Tang, Lei, and Huan Liu. YouTube (v2) Friendship Network. 2009, doi.org/10.1145/1557019.1557109.