Currently, online social networks such as
Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and
Foursquare have become extremely popular all
over the world and play a significant role in
people’s daily lives. People access OSNs using
both traditional desktop PCs and new emerging
mobile devices. With more than one billion
users worldwide, OSNs are a new venue of innovation
with many challenging research problems.
In this survey, we aim to give a
comprehensive review of state-of-the-art
research related to user behavior in OSNs from
several perspectives. First, we discuss social connectivity
and interaction among users. Also, we
investigate traffic activity from a network perspective.
Moreover, as mobile devices become a
commodity, we pay attention to the characteristics
of social behaviors in mobile environments.
Last but not least, we review malicious behaviors
of OSN users, and discuss several solutions
to detect misbehaving users. Our survey serves
the important roles of both providing a systematic
exploration of existing research highlights
and triggering various potentially significant
research in these topics.