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Social networks on the Internet

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  • Published: 26 January 2012
  • volume 16, pages 31–72 (2013)
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Social networks on the Internet
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  • Katarzyna Musiał1 &
  • Przemysław Kazienko2 

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Abstract

The rapid development and expansion of the Internet and the social–based services comprised by the common Web 2.0 idea provokes the creation of the new area of research interests, i.e. social networks on the Internet called also virtual or online communities. Social networks can be either maintained and presented by social networking sites like MySpace, LinkedIn or indirectly extracted from the data about user interaction, activities or achievements such as emails, chats, blogs, homepages connected by hyperlinks, commented photos in multimedia sharing system, etc. A social network is the set of human beings or rather their digital representations that refer to the registered users who are linked by relationships extracted from the data about their activities, common communication or direct links gathered in the internet–based systems. Both digital representations named in the paper internet identities as well as their relationships can be characterized in many different ways. Such diversity yields for building a comprehensive and coherent view onto the concept of internet–based social networks. This survey provides in–depth analysis and classification of social networks existing on the Internet together with studies on selected examples of different virtual communities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, King’s College London, Strand Campus, London, WC2R 2LS, UK

    Katarzyna Musiał

  2. Institute of Informatics, Wrocław University of Technology, Wybrzeze Wyspianskiego 27, 50-370, Wroclaw, Poland

    Przemysław Kazienko

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Correspondence to Katarzyna Musiał.

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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

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Musiał, K., Kazienko, P. Social networks on the Internet. World Wide Web 16, 31–72 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-011-0155-z

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  • Received: 12 November 2009

  • Revised: 28 June 2011

  • Accepted: 27 December 2011

  • Published: 26 January 2012

  • Issue Date: January 2013

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-011-0155-z

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Keywords

  • online social network
  • taxonomy of social networks
  • internet identity
  • virtual identity
  • internet relationship
  • homogeneous social network
  • system-based social network
  • internet multisystem social network
  • social networking site
  • survey

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