Thesis full text PDF (in Italian) - Politecnico di Milano

1 INTRODUCTION In the last five years, thanks to the diffusion of Web 2.0 [1] that enable users notonly to retrieve information on the web but also to contribute creating new ones,online social networks have become one of the major phenomena over Internet.People, through the development of new social media technologies, have begun toconnect with each others via Internet, sharing information, idea, common interest,membership in particular groups (i.e. friends, professional colleagues) [2],enabling them to meet strangers but in many cases also to make visible all“hidden tie” shared into the real world with known people.Despite there are many different types of online social network, focusing onindividuals (like Badoo, Facebook) or on contents (like SlideShare, YouTube),commonly they share a number of the following concepts [3]:- Profiles: allow each user to be identified over a social network.- Relationships: are connections between a user and others subscribed tothe same social network.- Contents: depending on the type of social network, they may beinformation exchanged between users through simples messages or7