Wayfinding in Social Networks

Abstract

With the recent explosion of popularity of commercial social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, the size of social networks that can be studied scientifically has passed from the scale traditionally studied by sociologists and an- thropologists to the scale of networksmore typically studied by computer scientists. In this chapter, I will highlight a recent line of computational research into themod- eling and analysis of the small-world phenomenon—the observation that typical pairs of people in a social network are connected by very short chains of interme- diate friends—and the ability of members of a large social network to collectively find efficient routes to reach individuals in the network. I will survey several recent mathematicalmodels of social networks that account for these phenomena, with an emphasis both on provable properties of these social-network models and on the empirical validation of the models against real large-scale social-network data.