Publications on Online social networks and social networking

This is a growing list of publications on Online Social Networks and related subjects, such as the measurement and analysis of online social networks, visualization of online social networks and the business models of online social networks.


Reports on online social networks

Global Faces and Networked Places: A Nielsen report on Social Networking’s New Global Footprint (PDF) - Global Faces and Networked Places: A Nielsen report on Social Networking’s New Global Footprint. How social networks are creating a potentially transformational change in consumer behaviour, putting the growth of social networks' popularity and engagement into context, how the audience to social networks is changing, the challenges advertisers on social networks have to face, what advertisers can do to advertise in social networks more efficiently, factors contributing to the Facebook phenomenon, why localisation has won the day in many countries, where mobile social networking has taken the greatest hold, what 'traditional' publishers can do in the face of the social network phenomenon. (2009)


Academic research projects on online social networks

The PeerSpective Project - The PeerSpective Project on integrating social networks and web search at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Saarbrücken and Kaiserslautern, Germany.


Academic papers on Online Social Networks

A social network caught in the Web - a paper presenting an analysis of Club Nexus, an online community at Stanford University, studying a reflection of the real world community structure within the student body, measuring social network phenomena such as the small world effect, clustering, the strength of weak ties, the formation of friendships and how the similarity of users decays as the distance between them in the network increases; by Lada A. Adamic, Orkut Buyukkokten and Eytan Adar (2003)
Social Networking on the Semantic Web - a working paper by Tim Finin, Li Ding and Lina Zou; University of Maryland, Baltimore MD
Papers submitted to the W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking - Papers submitted to the W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking, Barcelona, 2009.
The Future of the AppleSeed Platform - by Michael Chisari, creator of the AppleSeed platform (2009)
The Future of Social Networking - by Michael Chisari, creator of the AppleSeed Project (2009)
Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship - a research paper on Social Networking Sites by Danah M. Boyd, University of California-Berkeley and Nicole B. Ellison, Michigan State University; (2008)
Measurement and Analysis of Online Social Networks (PDF) - Measurement and Analysis of Online Social Networks: a conference paper by Alan Mislove, Massimiliano Marcon, Krishna P. Gummadi, Peter Druschel and Bobby Bhattacharjee. In Proceedings of the 5th ACM/USENIX Internet Measurement Conference (IMC'07), San Diego, CA, October 2007.
Exploiting Social Networks for Internet Search (PDF) - Exploiting Social Networks for Internet Search by Alan Mislove, Krishna P. Gummadi and Peter Druschel. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets'06), Irvine, CA, November 2006.
On the Evolution of User Interaction in Facebook (PDF) - On the Evolution of User Interaction in Facebook by Bimal Viswanath, Alan Mislove, Meeyoung Cha and Krishna P. Gummadi. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Social Networks (WOSN'09), Barcelona, Spain, August 2009.
A Measurement-driven Analysis of Information Propagation in the Flickr Social Network (PDF) - A Measurement-driven Analysis of Information Propagation in the Flickr Social Network Meeyoung Cha, Alan Mislove, and Krishna P. Gummadi. In Proceedings of the 18th Annual World Wide Web Conference (WWW'09), Madrid, Spain, April 2009.
Studying Online Social Networks - Studying Online Social Networks by Laura Garton and Barry Wellman, Centre for Urban and Community Studies, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto and Caroline Haythornthwaite, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1997)
Asynchronous discussion groups as Small World and Scale Free Networks - Asynchronous discussion groups as Small World and Scale Free Networks by Gilad Ravid and Sheizaf Rafaeli (2004)
What is the network form of online discussion groups? What are the topological parameters delineating the interaction on such groups? We report an empirical examination of the form of online discussion groups. We are interested in examining whether such groups conform to the Small World and the Scale Free models of networks. Support for these expectations provides a formal expression of growth, survival potential and preferential attachment in the connection patterns in discussion groups. The research questions were tested with a sample of over 8,000 active participants, and over 30,000 messages. We find that the social network resulting from discussion groups is indeed a Scale Free Network, based on In, Out and All Degree distributions. We also find that, for the same sample, discussion groups are a Small World Network too. As expected, the clustering coefficients for these groups differ significantly from random networks, while their characteristic path lengths are similar to random networks. Implications of the topology for the design and understanding of discussion groups include the stability and control of such groups, as well as their longevity.
Social Influence and the Diffusion of User-Created Content (PDF) - Social Influence and the Diffusion of User-Created Content: an empirical study of user-to-user content transfer occurring in the context of a time-evolving social network in Second Life; by Eytan Bakshy, Brian Karrer and Lada A. Adamic, University of Michigan (2009)
CouchSurfing Trust - Surfing a web of trust: reputation and reciprocity on CouchSurfing.com. Reputation mechanisms are essential for online transactions, where the parties have little prior experience with one another. This is especially true when transactions result in offline interactions. The CouchSurfing network displays a high degree of reciprocal interaction and a large strongly connected component of individuals surfing the globe. This high degree of interaction and reciprocity among participants is enabled by a reputation system that allows individuals to vouch for one another. We find that the strength of a friendship tie is most predictive of whether an individual will vouch for another. However, vouches based on weak ties outnumber those between close friends. We discuss these and other factors that could inform a more robust reputation system.
Proceedings of the International Symposium on Social Intelligence and Networking (SIN-09), Vancouver, Canada, 2009; by Debra Lauterbach, Hung Truong, Tanuj Shah and Lada A. Adamic (2009)
Surfing a web of trust: reputation and reciprocity on CouchSurfing.com - The faculty's digital library page describing the above mentioned CouchSurfing Research project at the University of Michigan (2009)


Theses on Online Social Networks

Alan Mislove. Online Social Networks: Measurement, Analysis, and Applications to Distributed Information Systems - Alan Mislove. Online Social Networks: Measurement, Analysis, and Applications to Distributed Information Systems. Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Computer Science, Rice University, May 2009. Advisors: Peter Druschel and Krishna P. Gummadi.


Integrating Online social networks and web search

Social Browsing: Integrating Social Networks and Web Browsing (PDF) - Social Browsing: Integrating Social Networks and Web Browsing a publication about SocialBrowsing, a Firefox extension that adds social context to the web browsing experience. The extension is paired with services provided by social networking websites, analyzes the page's contents, and adds tooltips and highlighting to indicate when there is relevant social information. The authors present an overview of the tool and implementation, and outline future steps for analysis; by Jennifer Golbeck and Michael M. Wasser, University of Maryland (2007)


Business models of Online Social Networks

An Overview of business models for Web 2.0 communities - business models for Web 2.0 communities - by Roman Hoegg, Robert Martignoni, Miriam Meckel, Katarina Stanoevska-Slabeva, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland (2006)
New business models arise and existing business models are highly affected by Web 2.0 communities. The objective of this paper is to describe the phenomenon of Web 2.0 communities and to provide a systematic overview of current and emerging business models. Specifically, the paper addresses the following questions: 1) What are the fundamentals of Web 2.0 communities? 2) What are existing business models of Web 2.0 communities? Based on the answers of the two questions, the paper tries to provide a more profound definition of Web 2.0 and of Web 2.0 communities. Forty Web 2.0 communities have been analyzed and described in the form of case studies.

Social Network Research Resources

Danah Boyd's collection of SN publications - Danah Boyd's extensive collection of research publications on Social Networking (2009)
SocialNetworks.org - SocialNetworks.org is a great resource of academic bibliography on online social networks; Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
Short Summaries of Social Network Publications - Short Summaries of Social Network Publications by Jian-Ming Lee, Duke University (2004)


Academic publications on Social media

The Network in the Garden (PDF) - The Network in the Garden: An Empirical Analysis of Social Media in Rural Life by Eric Gilbert, Karrie Karahalios and Christian Sandvig University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2008)


Academic publications on Viral marketing

The Dynamics of Viral marketing (PDF) - by Jure Leskovec, Carnegie Mellon University, Lada A. Adamic, University of Michigan and Bernardo A. Huberman, HP Labs; (2006)


Visualization of Online Social Networks

Visualizing Online Social Networks - a permanently updated list of academic research projects visualizing online social networks.

Social Network Researchers

NEW! Find People Doing Research in Social Networking-related areas - a growing collection of links to personal websites of researchers working in Social Networking or Social Web-related areas.


Books on networks
  Evolution of Networks: From Biological Nets to the Internet and WWW Our physical existence is based on various biological networks. We have recently learned that the term "network" turns out to be a central notion in our time, and the onsequent explosion of interest in networks is a social and cultural phenomenon. The principles of the complex organization and evolution of networks, natural and artificial are the topic of this book, which is written by physicists and is addressed to all involved researchers and students. The aim of the text is to understand networks and the basic principles of their structural organization and evolution; by S.N. Dorogovtsev and J.F.F. Mendes (2003)


Ideas on Social Network Research

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