most recent 30 from http://www.or-exchange.com 2010-07-31T00:36:27Z http://www.or-exchange.com/feeds/user/55 http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/rdf http://www.or-exchange.com/questions/143/applications-in-social-networks/147#147 grembo 2010-01-25T19:38:46Z 2010-01-25T19:38:46Z

<p>For an optimization problem I'd have to assume there's some sort of objective function. If you're a band on MySpace, you want to get people to listen to your music and come to your shows. If you're on LinkedIn and looking for a job, you want to attract the largest number of employers that whose needs match your skills. And maybe some users just want to maximize the number of views of their pages. </p> <p>What is interesting about any of these, is how people's interest ebbs and flows over time. Even on sites like OR-Exchange or Stack Overflow, question and answer threads get hot and cold. I would suspect that any sort of analysis of social networking sites would have to take into account this 'lifecycle'. Where does this lifecycle come from? Is it a natural output of our attention span or is it a combination of the technology and some measurable behavior? </p> <p>In the end, we all have sets of discrete choices: view/don't view, read/don't read, comment/don't comment, etc. Building up a model that describes this behavior might be the backbone to explore optimizing around the behavior. Discrete choice behavior to account for people's choices, markov processes to account for the stochastic nature of the changes in states, and some lifecycle growth and decline imposed on (or derived from) the overall process.</p> <p>This is probably similar to Paul's approach above, but adds the phenomena of a lifecycle to the mix. </p>