Social Media and Networks

 

ALAN MISLOVE

 

Recently, online social networking sites have exploded in popularity; numerous sites are dedicated to exchanging end-user generated content, such as photos on Flickr, videos on YouTube, and status updates on Twitter. These sites represent a new type of information system, where links between users (as opposed to links between content items) are the primary manner in which information is structured. In this lecture, I provide an overview of recent research in this space. First, I provide some background on the recent explosion of social media, and discuss work which has characterized existing social media platforms. Second, I examine well-known results from other fields (e.g., sociology) and examine the extent to which these results translate to online social media. Third, I discuss ways in which the properties of the social networks that underlie these sites can be used to improve the sites themselves.