In recent years,with the rapid growth of social network services(SNS),social networks pervade nearly every aspect of our daily lives.Social networks are influencing today’s societal and cultural issues,and changing the way of people seeing themselves.To fully understand the running mechanisms of social networks,in this paper,we aim at series of high knitted and important elements of online social networks.We mainly focus on 3 important but also open research problems,they are(1)structural properties and evolving laws,(2)social crowds and their interaction behaviors and(3)information and its diffusion.In this paper,we review the related work on the 3 problems.Then,we briefly introduce some interesting research directions and our progress on these research problems.
