Personalised network activity feeds: Finding needles in the haystacks

Abstract

Social networks have evolved over the last decade into an omni-popular phenomenon that revolutionised both the online and offline interactions between people. The volume of user generated content for discovery on social networks is overwhelming and ever growing, and while time spend on social networking sites has increased, the flood of incoming information still greatly exceeds the capacity of information that any one user can deal with. Personalisation of social network activity news feeds is proposed as the solution that highlights and promotes items of a particular interest and relevance, in order to prioritise attention and maximise discovery for the user. In this chapter, we survey and examine the various research approaches for the personalisation of social network news feeds and identify the synergies and challenges faced by research in this space.