Social Network Analysis: Hardly easy

Since late 1970s, Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques have evolved as one of the successful applications of internet. There are numerous reasons that demand the better understanding the structure of a social network, justify the need of their analysis and also studying the impact of these on future internet. For instance, finding the shared interest and trust could be one of the reasons to study a social network. Moreover, if future distributed online social networks are popular and bandwidth-intensive, they can have a significant impact on Internet traffic, just as current peer-to-peer content distribution networks do. Regardless of one´s stance on these phenomena, a better understanding of the structure of social networks are likely to improve our understanding of the opportunities, limitations, and threats associated with these ideas. The paper presents an engraved review of need of social network analysis and also the implications associated with the same. It is discovered that there are lot of parameters which must be considered while analyzing any social network and also this analysis spans from pure mathematical modeling to graphical representations.