6 CONCLUSIONS The ma<strong>in</strong> objectives of this thesis project have been the study of the reputationproblem with<strong>in</strong> social networks, the def<strong>in</strong>ition of analysis metrics and models, andthe creation of a web application capable to render history charts related toquantitative data (like uploads, views, comments, posts, etc.), daily collected,about all the social profiles provided by users that decides to jo<strong>in</strong> it.In particular, dur<strong>in</strong>g the project implementation, <strong>di</strong>fferent types between the mostcommon social networks have been chosen, analys<strong>in</strong>g the <strong>in</strong>formation madeavailable by their APIs and def<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g a specific data structure capable to memorizeall the daily variations of the social values observed.Into the web application realized, they have been created two sections, the firstone hav<strong>in</strong>g functionality of “contents aggregator”, that visualize real-timeupdates of the social profiles related to the user selected and, the second one,hav<strong>in</strong>g the ma<strong>in</strong> objective to summarize, through the “unified visibility panel”,the onl<strong>in</strong>e social activity of the user, provid<strong>in</strong>g a prospectus for each socialnetwork jo<strong>in</strong>ed by him, through an overview of the quantitative data collected, aswell as, <strong>in</strong><strong>di</strong>cators of social “productivity” and “visibility”. Influenc<strong>in</strong>g variables,for both <strong>in</strong><strong>di</strong>cators, have been chosen conduc<strong>in</strong>g an accurate analysis tak<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>toconsideration, not only the social <strong>in</strong>formation daily collected through thescheduler, but also the type of content on which the social network focus.92
By <strong>in</strong>troduc<strong>in</strong>g the concept of social network, they have been presented the ma<strong>in</strong>characteristics and provided some examples of them, tak<strong>in</strong>g also <strong>in</strong>toconsiderations those used dur<strong>in</strong>g the implementation phase.Subsequently, the def<strong>in</strong>ition of social network analysis has been provided,describ<strong>in</strong>g which are the key po<strong>in</strong>ts of it, and present<strong>in</strong>g some examples conducedby universities and expertise.F<strong>in</strong>ally, before start<strong>in</strong>g the real implementation of the thesis project, an overviewon the <strong>in</strong>formation made available by the APIs of the <strong>di</strong>fferent social networksidentified, has been conduced, this <strong>in</strong> order to choose four of them, with <strong>di</strong>fferentfeatures, able to give enough <strong>in</strong>formation, related to the users’ profiles.The f<strong>in</strong>al choice is relapsed on Twitter, Facebook, SlideShare and YouTube.93