Social Networks analysis: Trends, techniques and future prospects

The Online Social Networks have become a very popular Web 2.0 application. The powerful combination of methods and techniques makes social networks analysis special. This paper discusses the challenges and opportunities that emerge from this evolution of social networks, and provides structure to better understand the rapidly evolving field of social networks. The paper reviews the current state-of-the-art in the selected aspects of social networks and presents a set of open research challenges related to online social networks. The challenges suggest that significant further research is required in social networks.