This paper leverages the unique opportunity of Google launching the Google+ OSN. Through multiple crawls of the Google+ OSN, before and after the official public release of the network, our results provide insights into the social graph dynamics of the birth of an OSN. Our findings underline the impact of peculiar aspects of Google+ such as (a) Google’s large initial user base taken over from other Google products and (b) Google+’s provision for asymmetric friendships, on its graph structure, especially in light of previously studied OSN graphs. In addition, we study the geographic distribution of the users and links of Google+, and correlate the social graph with additional information available from the public profiles.

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