How to define a “Social Network”?
Although the term, Online Social Network, may seem redundant, there have been many types of social networks created throughout history. However, in the context of the Internet, it refers to websites which connect friends, family, professionals, and other types of groups together using some kind of registration and identification system. And these groups of users may be targeted with advertising messages because, as an audience, they are already very well-defined. Definition: According to the Encyclopedia definition, “Social networks are formally defined as a set of nodes that are tied by one or more specific types of relations.” In our context, the nodes would be the network members, who are tied either directly (“my contacts”) or indirectly (“contacts of my contacts” etc.). Technically, a network usually consists of detailed profile pages of individual persons that are linked to each other, with the possibility to interact one to one via private messages or emails. The goal is to find