Structure and evolution of online social networks

Abstract

Social networks are complex systems which evolve through interactions among a growing set of actors or users. A popular methodology of studying such systems is to use tools of complex network theory to analyze the evolution of the networks, and the topological properties that emerge through the process of evolution.With the exponential rise in popularity of Online Social Networks (OSNs) in recent years, there have been a number of studies which measure the topological properties of such networks. Several network evolution models have also been proposed to explain the emergence of these properties, such as those based on preferential attachment, heterogeneity of nodes, and triadic closure.We survey some of these studies in this chapter. We also describe in detail a preferential attachment based model to analyze the evolution of OSNs in the presence of restrictions on node-degree that are presently being imposed in all popular OSNs.