Recent research suggests that, as in offline scenarios, spatial proximity increases the likelihood that two individuals establish an online social connection, and geographic closeness could therefore influence the formation of online communities. In this work we present a study of communities in two online social networks with location-sharing features and analyze their social and spatial prope...

In this article, an online support community for older people is studied, with the aim of developing a taxonomy of social roles based on content analysis and social network analysis. Four hundred messages (posted between August 9, 2007, and February 5, 2008) in an online support community for older people (http://www.seniornet.org) were investigated. The data were analyzed to identify and shed ...

Social network analysis has received much attention from Corporations recently. Corporations are trying to utilize social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Sina Weibo to expand their own markets. Our system is an online tool to assist these corporations to 1) find potential customers, and 2) track a list of users by specific events from social networks. We employ both textual and ne...

Online social networks (OSNs) are often flooded with scathing remarks against individuals or businesses on their perceived wrongdoing. This paper studies three such events to get insight into various aspects of shaming done through twitter. An important contribution of our work is categorization of shaming tweets, which helps in understanding the dynamics of spread of online shaming events. It ...

The rapid development and expansion of the social services and social networking sites (SNSs) on the Internet has boosted interdisciplinary research on online communities as a part of social network analysis. Social networking creates a unique opportunity to establish new business contacts with people from unexplored markets to gain new customers or contractors. The goal of the paper is to pres...

With the exponential growth of online social network services such as Facebook and Twitter, social networks and social medias become more and more important, directly influencing politics, economics, and our daily life. Mining big social networks aims to collect and analyze web-scale social data to reveal patterns of individual and group behaviors. It is an inherently interdisciplinary academic...

The widespread adoption of Online Social Networks (OSNs), the ever-increasing amount information produced by their users, and corresponding capacity to influence markets, politics, society, have led both industrial academic researchers focus on how such systems could be influenced . While previous work has mainly focused measuring current influential contents, or pages overall OSNs, problem pre...

Research on online communities has generated multiple insights into why people join and contribute to online communities. From this research, a theoretical understanding of how to design online communities is emerging. We contribute to this understanding by investigating the impact of an increasingly common but understudied design option available to online communities: whether to integrate wit...