Ask YC: What Social network questions would you like to see answered?

[Anon84]

Imagine you have complete information about the evolution of a relatively large (10^5-10^6 users) social network. Who connects to whom, when, and some basic information about each user.

What questions would like to see answered?

Which quantities do you think will be of most practical interest for the next few years?

Can you direct me to some standard (and not so standard) literature in this field?

[ComputerGuru]

I'm particularly interested in how users use and interact with tags, but it's a really complicated topic....

I blogged about the need for a tagging standard in the past, and raised a number of questions & concerns therein.. a couple of commenters promised to share their findings if their social networks took off, but to no avail:

http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/the-need-for-creating-tag-stan...

[Mystalic]

I want to get info on trends to predict future behavior. What type of information makes teenagers and college students more susceptible to suicide? Could we predict that with complete social networking information?

Can we determine a person's cognitive capabilities by their trends and actions?

Can we predict future trends in markets and purchasing habits via a complete social network?

THAT is what I want to know.

[culley]

Rob Cross has a nice book on Social Network Analysis.

Google Social Network Analysis to get a quick over view of the field and the relevant open questions.