In the age of Web 2.0 users contribute to platforms success by providing personal information by actively uploading information (e.g. messages, preferences, biographies) and also by leaving traces of their online behavoiour as can be derived from their clicks, navigation paths, etc. While there is a market for trading such information among companies, there is little knowledge about how users actually value their personal information. In an online survey-based experiment we have asked 1.045 Facebook users how much they would be willing to pay for keeping their personal information. Surprisingly, 48.1 percent of participants are not willing to pay a single Euro, - thus, valuing their information at zero. Results indicate that people that show 'spamming' behaviour and users that use Facebook for 'diary keeping' are significantly more willing to pay a certain amount higher than zero to be able to keep their personal Facebook information. Interestingly, having analysed various kinds of user behaviour, the regression model still explains no more than 14.2 percent of variance. Additionally, this article discusses four different method manipulations for eliciting people's willingness to pay for personal information and provides methodical guidance for future research in the field.

Social media is becoming a bigger part of society and has now become a regular part of the worldof professional companies. Incentive is a social intranet for companies, developed by Mindroute inSweden. Incentive is available online but for the moment not as an application for Android. This thesis focuses on developing a prototype Android application for Incentive, evaluating theusability of the result. Two designs were developed and the study showed that while both weregood and user friendly a combination of the two should be considered.

This thesis develops an approach to extract the social relation between characters in literary text to create a social network. The approach uses co-occurrences of named entities, keywords associated with the named entities, and the dependency relations that exist between the named entities to construct the network. Literary texts contain a large amount of pronouns to represent the named entities, to resolve the antecedents of pronouns, a pronoun resolution system is implemented based on a standard pronoun resolution algorithm. The results indicate that the pronoun resolution system finds the correct named entity in 60,4\% of all cases. The social network is evaluated by comparing character importance rankings based on graph properties with an independently human generated importance rankings. The generated social networks correlate moderately to strongly with the independent character ranking.

Abstract Context: Online social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace have become the preferred interaction, entertainment and socializing facility on the Internet. However, these social network services also bring privacy issues in more limelight than ever. Several privacy leakage problems are highlighted in the literature with a variety of suggested countermeasures. Most of these measures further add complexity and management overhead for the user. One ignored aspect with the architecture of online social networks is that they do not offer any mechanism to calculate the strength of relationship between individuals. This information is quite useful to identify possible privacy threats. Objectives: In this study, we identify users’ privacy concerns and their satisfaction regarding privacy control measures provided by online social networks. Furthermore, this study explores data mining techniques to predict the levels/intensity of friendship in online social networks. This study also proposes a technique to utilize predicted friendship levels for privacy preservation in a semi-automatic privacy framework. Methods: An online survey is conducted to analyze Facebook users’ concerns as well as their interaction behavior with their good friends. On the basis of survey results, an experiment is performed to justify practical demonstration of data mining phases. Results: We found that users are concerned to save their private data. As a precautionary measure, they restrain to show their private information on Facebook due to privacy leakage fears. Additionally, individuals also perform some actions which they also feel as privacy vulnerability. This study further identifies that the importance of interaction type varies while communication. This research also discovered, “mutual friends” and “profile visits”, the two non-interaction based estimation metrics. Finally, this study also found an excellent performance of J48 and Naïve Bayes algorithms to classify friendship levels. Conclusions: The users are not satisfied with the privacy measures provided by the online social networks. We establish that the online social networks should offer a privacy mechanism which does not require a lot of privacy control effort from the users. This study also concludes that factors such as current status, interaction type need to be considered with the interaction count method in order to improve its performance. Furthermore, data mining classification algorithms are tailor-made for the prediction of friendship levels.

To end up as an immigrant in an unknown country and to try to participate in the majority society means both psychological and physical difficulties where their whole life is changing. Gemensamma Krafter is a prevention changing work in a housing area in Borlänge. It works among other things as a meeting place for people from different cultures. The aim with this study was to describe and to get increased understanding for the lives of a number of immigrant women who lives in Borlänge/Sweden and which importance “Gemensamma Krafter” has had for them. Eight women from Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Somalia were interviewed and the material was analyzed on the basis of categorisations of expressed meanings. The results show on a complex picture of these women’s lives in Borlänge. Their experience that Sweden is a safe country with a personal freedom without wars and with social rights as equal as other citizens is obvious but their experience of exclusion, discrimination and everyday racism is always present. The community with compatriots becomes important when one does not become accepted and participating in the majority society. It is in this community where the immigrant women strengthens their own identities and mobilizes the force to a future's faith on work, education and participation in the society. Gemensamma Krafter is described by the women as an oasis, a meeting place where they can be confirmed and accepted for the persons they are. Here they meet Swedish women and get an insight in their world. The study gives an increased knowledge and understanding for the lives of the immigrant women and the importance of natural meeting places in the local society. / Att hamna i ett okänt land och försöka bli delaktig i majoritetssamhället innebär både psykiska och fysiska svårigheter där hela ens livsvärld förändras. Gemensamma Krafter är ett förebyggande förändringsarbete i ett bostadsområde i Borlänge. Det fungerar bl.a. som en mötesplats för människor från olika kulturer. Syftet med studien var att beskriva och få en ökad förståelse för invandrarkvinnors liv i Borlänge/Sverige och vilken betydelse Gemensamma Krafter haft för kvinnorna. Åtta kvinnor från Syrien, Irak, Turkiet och Somalia intervjuades och materialet analyserades utifrån meningskategorisering. Resultatet visar på en komplex bild av dessa kvinnors liv i Borlänge/Sverige. De uttryckte att Sverige är ett tryggt land med frihet utan krig och med sociala rättigheter som andra medborgare men att upplevelsen av utanförskap, diskriminering och vardagsrasism finns ständigt närvarande. Gemenskapen med egna landsmän blir viktig när de inte blir accepterad och delaktig i majoritetssamhället. Det är där de stärker sin egen identitet och mobiliserar kraften till en framtidstro på arbete, utbildning och delaktighet i samhället. Gemensamma Krafter beskrivs av kvinnorna som en oas, en mötesplats där de blir bekräftad och accepterad. Där träffar de svenska kvinnor och får en inblick i deras värld. Studien ger en ökad kunskap och förståelse för invandrarkvinnornas liv och visar på vikten av naturliga mötesplatser i lokalsamhället.

The usage of social media such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook has expanded drastically. Today almost every organization has a Facebook page and a Twitter account that complements their webpage and their physical stores. However, why and how are they using these social medias?  This research focuses on why and how organizations are using Facebook and Twitter in their business strategy. More specifically, what methods and organizational strategies are used. The requirement for our research was that the organization had to had some success on these social medias but due to time and budget limitations, the research is restricted to three local organizations that have a national presence. Conducting primary data with three face-to-face semi-structured interviews and obtaining secondary data such as books, theses and academic journals we had the data to make an analysis about how Facebook and Twitter could make these three organizations gain competitive advantage.  By correctly utilizing the tools that social networking sites (SNS) provide; organizations can make way for a differentiation path that provides competitive advantage, build brand awareness, and provide statistical tools for evaluating customer behavior. One of the benefits of SNS is that they are virtually free to implement, both from a capital and human resource investment point of view. This research shows that organizations utilizing SNS in order to gain competitive advantage need to focus on creating a committed and engaged user base. By keeping in mind the drivers of differentiation: timing, location, linkages and scale, organizations transform their competitive advantage into a sustained competitive advantage.

As of late there has been an immense increase of data within modern society. This is evident within the field of telecommunications. The amount of mobile data is growing fast. For a telecommunication operator, this provides means of getting more information of specific subscribers. The applications of this are many, such as segmentation for marketing purposes or detection of churners, people about to switching operator. Thus the analysis and information extraction is of great value. An approach of this analysis is that of social network analysis. Utilizing such methods yields ways of finding the importance of each individual subscriber in the network. This thesis aims at investigating the usefulness of social network analysis in telecommunication networks. As these networks can be very large the methods used to study them must scale linearly when the network size increases. Thus, an integral part of the study is to determine which social network analysis algorithms that have this scalability. Moreover, comparisons of software solutions are performed to find product suitable for these specific tasks. Another important part of using social network analysis is to be able to interpret the results. This can be cumbersome without expert knowledge. For that reason, a complete process flow for finding influential subscribers in a telecommunication network has been developed. The flow uses input easily available to the telecommunication operator. In addition to using social network analysis, machine learning is employed to uncover what behavior is associated with influence and pinpointing subscribers behaving accordingly.

Digital Identity

Although there has been much work done in the industry and academia on developing the theory and application of social networks as well as recommender systems, the relation between these research areas is still unclear. An innovative idea, which enables to integrate these areas, and applies recommendation systems to the online social network systems, is proposed in this thesis. Recommendation systems for social networks differ from the typical kinds of recommendation solutions, since they suggest human beings to other ones rather than inanimate goods. Thus, conventional recommendation methods should be enhanced by social features of the networks and their members. This thesis presents the result of the study on the recommendation framework for virtual communities. It also contains an overview of recent approaches to recommendation systems and social networks, as well as description of the online social network systems.

This diploma thesis deals with the written form of communication by users of the social networking website Facebook and members of specified groups. Its aim is to map errors in written expression in the topics of spelling lexicography, morphology and syntactics. In addition it is focused on analysing the extent to which typographical rules are disregarded. These problems were investigated by analysis of the inserted statuses and comments by the members of the selected and specified groups of Facebook. In my research, I found that a large number of the authors made elementary mistakes in spelling that are taught in the first grade of the primary school. Another important discovery is that many users hold the opinion that observing the grammatical rules is less of a priority than the content of their communication.