Online social networks have become important laboratories for social scientists studying human behavior. "The volume of online social networking is exploding, and it appears it is becoming more pervasive than real-life social networking," says Suffolk University professor Dan Stefanescu. Online social networks provide data that can be used to engineer new social systems and predict certain events and economic outcomes, Stefanescu says. Suffolk University researchers are studying the structure of online social networks and looking for properties that characterize them. "When studying different behaviors in online social networks, such as flow of information, bargaining power, flow of influence, it is useful to be able to characterize a node with respect to the whole network," Stefanescu says. He says the researchers use certain measures that can "describe various aspects of the 'importance' of a node in a network: how connected the node is, how easily it can reach other nodes, how much it mediates the connection between other nodes, etc." Stefanescu and colleagues are also studying interrelationships between offline characteristics of users, such as gender or culture, and their Internet preferences. They want to better understand the correlation between these offline characteristics and their online behavior, such as communication patterns and relationship building.
