Online Social Network Analysis

Introduction

Advent of internet and internet facilities has provided a conducive environment which has nurtured and cultivated social networks quite rapidly and profoundly since its inception around us. Devices equipped with internet and compatible with its applications like mobile phones, computers, laptops and other smart gadgets are within the reach of common men. Facebook, linkedln, twitter, flickr, etc. are the most popular web applications of online social networks evolved over the years and are still in development mode by understanding the behavior of its users. Tremendous generation of wide variety of data through these social networking sites as per evolution of their context such as Flickr is designed basically for various kinds of content sharing amongst users whereas Facebook is designed explicitly for social interactions amongst the users and linkdln is designed specifically for professional interaction. Generally directly or indirectly the social networking sites are being developed for social interactions. In other words social network can be referred as network of relationships where nodes are the users or individuals and edges or links connecting nodes represents some kind of relationship (friends, brothers, sisters, father-son, coauthors, classmates, etc.) between them. It was obvious that social networks are not evolved for specifically internet based networks like Facebook; these social networks have been studied from the point of sociology for generic interaction amongst the groups of nodes(user/actors) and biomedical science for understanding the biomedical structures like protein- protein network. There are various types of networks prevailing around us which are categorized below as to understand their nature and behavior.