A Study of Friendship Networks and Blogosphere

Abstract

In Golbeck and Hendler (2006), authors consider those social friendship networking sites where users explicitly provide trust ratings to other members. However, for large social friendship networks it is infeasible to assign trust ratings to each and every member so they propose an inferring mechanism which would assign binary trust ratings (trustworthy/non-trustworthy) to those who have not been assigned one. They demonstrate the use of these trust values in e-mail ?ltering application domain and report encouraging results. Authors also assume three crucial properties of trust for their approach to work: transitivity, asymmetry, and personalization. These trust scores are often transitive, meaning, if Alice trusts Bob and Bob trusts Charles then Alice can trust Charles. Asymmetry says that for two people involved in a relationship, trust is not necessarily identical in both directions. This is contrary to what was proposed in Yu and Singh (2003). They assume symmetric trust values in the social friendship network. Social networks allow us to share experiences, thoughts, opinions, and ideas. Members of these networks, in return experience a sense of community, a feeling of belonging, a bonding that members matter to one another and their needs will be met through being together. Individuals expand their social networks, convene groups of like-minded individuals and nurture discussions. In recent years, computers and the World Wide Web technologies have pushed social networks to a whole new level. It has made possible for individuals to connect with each other beyond geographical barriers in a “flat” world. The widespread awareness and pervasive usability of the social networks can be partially attributed to Web 2.0. Representative interaction Web services of social networks are social friendship networks, the blogosphere, social and collaborative annotation (aka “folksonomies”), and media sharing. In this work, we brie?y introduce each of these with focus on social friendship networks and the blogosphere. We analyze and compare their varied characteristics, research issues, state-of-the-art approaches, and challenges these social networking services have posed in community formation, evolution and dynamics, emerging reputable experts and in?uential members of the community, information diffusion in social networks, community clustering into meaningful groups, collaboration recommendation, mining “collective wisdom” or “open source intelligence” from the exorbitantly available user-generated contents. We present a comparative study and put forth subtle yet essential differences of research in friendship networks and Blogosphere, and shed light on their potential research directions and on cross-pollination of the two fertile domains of ever expanding social networks on the Web.