Business Models for On-line Social Networks: Challenges and Opportunities

With the increasingly ubiquitous nature of social networks and Cloud computing, users are starting to explore new ways to interact with and exploit these developing paradigms. Social networks reflect real world relationships that allow users to share information and form connections, essentially creating dynamic virtual communities. By leveraging the pre-established trust formed through friend relationships within a social network “Social Clouds” can be realized, which enable friends to share resources within the context of a social network. The creation of Social Clouds gives rise to new business models through collaboration within social networks. In this paper, the authors describe such business models and discuss their impact.