Chapter 9. SOCIAL NETWORKS

"The internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow."

—Bill Gates, Cofounder of Microsoft

Social networks bring another dimension to the Web by considering the links between people and emerging communities, in addition to the links between web pages. Social network analysis is having a major impact on search and navigation technologies in ways which were hard to predict a few years ago. Technologies such as peer-to-peer networks, collaborative filtering, and weblogs (known as blogs) are examples of social software, utilizing the way in which web users interact with each other and with the web in order to add value to existing information seeking methods.