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Online Identities and Social Networking

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Handbook of Social Network Technologies and Applications

Abstract

Online identities play a critical role in the social web that is taking shape on the Internet. Despite many technical proposals for creating and managing online identities, none has received widespread acceptance. Design and implementation of online identities that are socially acceptable on the Internet remains an open problem. This chapter discusses the interplay between online identities and social networking. Online social networks (OSNs) are growing at a rapid pace and has millions of members in them. While the recent trend is to create explicit OSNs such as Facebook and MySpace, we also have implicit OSNs such as interaction graphs created by email and instant messaging services. Explicit OSNs allow users to create profiles and use them to project their identities on the web. There are many interesting identity related issues in the context of social networking including how OSNs help and hinder the definition of online identities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada, H3A 2A7

    Muthucumaru Maheswaran

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  1. Muthucumaru Maheswaran
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  2. Bader Ali
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  3. Hatice Ozguven
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  4. Julien Lord
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Correspondence to Muthucumaru Maheswaran .

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  1. Dept. of Comp. & Elect. Engin. and, Florida Atlantic University, Glades Road 777, Boca Raton, 33431, Florida, USA

    Borko Furht

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Maheswaran, M., Ali, B., Ozguven, H., Lord, J. (2010). Online Identities and Social Networking. In: Furht, B. (eds) Handbook of Social Network Technologies and Applications. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7142-5_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7142-5_11

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