Research on Online Social Networks: Time to Face

Online Social Networks (OSNs) provide a unique opportu-nity for researchers to study how a combination of techno-logical, economical, and social forces have been conspiring to provide a service that has attracted the largest user pop-ulation in the history of the Internet. With more than half a billion of users and counting, OSNs have the potential to impact almost every aspect of networking, including mea-surement and performance modeling and analysis, network architecture and system design, and privacy and user behav-ior, to name just a few. However, much of the existing OSN research literature seems to have lost sight of this unique op-portunity and has avoided dealing with the new challenges posed by OSNs. We argue in this position paper that it is high time for OSN researcher to exploit and face these challenges to provide a basic understanding of the OSN eco-system as a whole. Such an understanding has to reflect the key role users play in this system and must focus on the system’s dynamics, purpose and functionality when trying to illuminate the main technological, economic, and social forces at work in the current OSN revolution. 1