Online Social Networks

Capitalize on the small world phenomenon: Everybody in a network can be reached through a short chain of social peers. A number of commercial and not-for-profit web-based social network sites emerged in 2002 and provide targeted search for business and social interaction.

Social Networking Portals originate from the field of network analysis [Wellman et al 1996]. Social Networking portals apply Stanley Milgram's six-degree-of-separation principle [Milgram 1967] in a network that generally represents a set of persons as nodes and relationships between them as edges. Profile information serves as a query parameter to retrieve resources matching relevance to users, documents and concepts. Social Networking Portals draw on the effect of identification and social participation in communities. An emerging form is the distributed social network, which interconnects weblogs and user profiles to augment online resources with a virtual network.

The feasibility and the resulting complexity management of social networks for online communities can be modelled and represented with the help of graph theory. Every member of the network is a node connected to his or her peers by directed edges.