Social-Networks

Now that I and the rest of the Internet has grown accustomed to Google Plus and Facebook’s most recent friend categorization features, I thought it was time to revisit and revise a previously unpublished piece of mine. Take a moment and think about your friends, family, colleagues, friends of friends, acquaintances, and members of the same social club. These six groups could comprise a large part, but certainly not all, of the people that you know. You may also have extended family, classmates, common members of sports teams, religious associations, and the familiar strangers you recognize, but don’t know their names. To further complicate matters, the people in these groups often change over time as we move through life. How we conduct ourselves depends on the situation. It is highly unlikely that you act the same way around your grandmother as you do at a party with your friends and people do not expect you to act the same way. Your friends, work colleagues, and extended family do not all know each other and I suspect that in many cases you would like to keep it that way. For this reason, it seems odd to expect that our interactions in online social networks would be any different. ...

Social network analysis is the study of connections, flows, and structure among people, groups, organizations, and systems. The points or nodes in the network may include people, routers, or even disease vectors. The ability to analyze communication patterns and social networks has become a major component of eDiscovery systems. Packages from Autonomy’s Zantaz, Cataphora, and Seagate’s i365 MetaLINCS all feature social network analysis functionality. Research, development, and experimentation in social network analysis tools are likely to make significant contributions to commercial eDiscovery systems in the future. Community, communication and collaboration services, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, FaceBook, and MySpace, are now commonly used in conjunction with institutional systems. These external services are not yet commonly integrated with most compliance and archiving systems. In this article I discuss the NodeXL and Maltego applications. Both of these tools offer a specialized feature set that could offer insight into future development for eDiscovery platforms in terms of external data and analysis of social networks. ...