Ranking users and information in online social networks

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (leaf 39).The goal of this project is to explore the design and implementation of SocialRank. SocialRank is a personalized ranking algorithm that provides--for each user--ratings for people in his online social network. Subsequently, these ratings are used to rank incoming information received by the user from those in his social network. We analyze the use of actions on online social networks as proxies for measuring the strength of relationships between users and introduce an action scoring mechanism that uses different factors to evaluate an action's significance. We implement SocialRank in a generic online social network that we build as part of this research project and explore the effectiveness and usefulness of SocialRank.by Abdulrahman I. Tarbzouni.M.Eng