At the most basic level, an online social network is an Internet community where individuals interact, often through profiles that (re)present their public persona (and their networks of connections) to others. Although the concept of computer-based communities dates back to the early days of computer networks, only after the advent of the commercial Internet did such communities meet public success. Following the SixDegrees.com
experience in 1997, hundreds of social networks spurred online (see [4] for an extended discussion), sometimes growing very rapidly, thereby attracting the attention of both media and academia. In particular, [5], [6], and [7] have taken ethnographic and sociological approaches to the study of online self-representation; [8] have focused on the value of online social networks as recommender systems; [4] have discussed information sharing
and privacy on online social networks, using FB as a case study; [9] have demonstrated how information revealed in social networks can be exploited for “social” phishing; [10] has studied identity-sharing behavior in online social networks.