In the information age, online collaboration and social networks are of increasing importance and quickly becoming an integral part of our lifestyle. In business, social networking can be a powerful tool to expand a customer network to which a company can sell products and services, or find new partners / employees in a more trustworthy and targeted manner. Identifying new friends or partners, on social networking websites, is usually done via a keyword search, browsing a directory of topics (e.g. interests, geography, or employer) or a chain of social ties (e.g. links to other friends on a user’s profile). However there are limitations to these three approaches. Keyword search typically produces a list of ranked results, where traversing pages of ranked results can be tedious and time consuming to explore. A directory of groups / networks is generally created manually, requires significant ongoing maintenance and cannot keep up with rapid changes. Social chains require the initial u...
Richard T. Freeman