2008 Proceeding- Program Chairs:
- Lex Stein,
- Alan Mislove
In the past couple of years, websites such as Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube have rocketed to the top of web popularity. These sites are instances of what is known as "Web 2.0". Notably, and in contrast to the more traditional popular sites such as portals, search engines, or news aggregators, these sites are organized around user identities and a social network (or graph) of links between identities.
The social network gives users a new basis for forming and maintaining relationships and locating, consuming, filtering, and publishing content. Since the social network is expressed in a formal way, it can also be used by non-user system components to improve performance, security, or other objectives based on assumptions about trust or shared interests. A social network system is a software system organized around a dynamic social network core. The study and understanding of these systems is highly relevant to the systems community.
Surprisingly, despite both their exciting possibilities and their amazing popularity growth, social network systems have been largely neglected by researchers. To begin to remedy this, we have organized this workshop; the First Workshop on Social Network Systems (SocialNets'08).
As a first-year workshop, we were pleasantly surprised to receive sixteen high-quality submissions. We accepted eight into the workshop, for an acceptance rate of exactly 50 percent. A tight reviewing schedule gave the program committee just over one week to complete and submit reviews. However, we are happy to report that all papers received at least three reviews from program committee members.
The workshop papers cover a range of topics on social network systems. The presentations are organized into three broad sessions; the measurement and analysis of existing social networks, issues of security and privacy in social network systems, and new applications that leverage social networks. Many of the papers are likely to spark lively discussion at the workshop.
Proceeding Downloads
Identifying user behavior in online social networks
Online social networks pose an interesting problem: how to best characterize the different classes of user behavior. Traditionally, user behavior characterization methods, based on user individual features, are not appropriate for online networking ...
Distinct types of hubs in human dynamic networks
The emergence of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) has culminated in a new generation of wireless networking. New communication paradigms using dynamic interconnectedness as people encounter each other lead towards a world where digital traffic flows. We ...
Islands in the MSN messenger buddy network
The MSN messenger buddy network comprises a giant component and many small islands. Being curious about the existence of the small islands, we study their topologies and find that they favor part of the possible topologies. Specifically, fully connected ...
A Sybil-proof one-hop DHT
Decentralized systems, such as structured overlays, are subject to the Sybil attack, in which an adversary creates many false identities to increase its influence. This paper describes a one-hop distributed hash table which uses the social links between ...
Talking to strangers without taking their candy: isolating proxied content
Social networks have begun supporting external content integration with platforms like OpenSocial and the Facebook API. These platforms let users install third- party applications and are a popular example of a mashup. Content integration is often ...
An offline foundation for online accountable pseudonyms
Online anonymity often appears to undermine accountability, offering little incentive for civil behavior, but accountability failures usually result not from anonymity itself but from the disposability of virtual identities. A user banned for ...
Friendstore: cooperative online backup using trusted nodes
Today, it is common for users to own more than tens of gigabytes of digital pictures, videos, experimental traces, etc. Although many users already back up such data on a cheap second disk, it is desirable to also seek off-site redundancies so that ...
RoadSpeak: enabling voice chat on roadways using vehicular social networks
A great number of people spend one or more hours each day driving between home and the office. These daily roadway commutes are highly predictable and regular, and provide a great opportunity to form virtual mobile communities. However, even though ...