The vast majority of earlier work has focused on graphs which are both connected (typically by ignoring all but the giant connected component), and unweighted. Here we study numerous, real, weighted graphs, and report surprising discoveries on the way in which new nodes join and form links in a social network. The motivating questions were the following: How do connected components in a graph form and change over time? What happens after new nodes join a network– how common are repeated edges? We study nu- merous diverse, real graphs (citation networks, networks in social media, internet traffic, and others); and make the following contributions:

• we observe that the non-giant connected components seem to stabilize in size,
• we observe the weights on the edges follow several power laws with surprising exponents, and (c) we propose an intuitive, generative model for graph growth that obeys observed patterns.

Joint work with Leman Akoglu and Christos Faloutsos.