A Review of Trust in Online Social Networks to Explore New Research Agenda

Abstract

Trust has become important topic of research in many fields including sociology, psychology, philosophy, economics, business, law and of course in IT. In recent years, there is a dramatic growth in number and popularity of online social networks. There are many networks available with more than 100 million registered users such as Facebook, MySpace, QZone, Windows Live Spaces etc. People may connect, discover and share by using these online social networks. The exponential growth of online communities in the area of social networks attracts the attention of the researchers about the importance of managing trust in online environment. The major challenge of the current online user is to identify the trustworthiness of the agents they are communicating. Trust can be calculated between two unknown agents who are not directly connected in a trust network rather connected somehow through the network. In this paper, we have reviewed the state-of-the-art research work on trust in online social network and discussed about the relevant research agenda