With over half a billion users, Online social networks (OSN) are now a mainstream research topic of interest for theoretical physicists, epidemiologists, economists, and computer scientists. For the SIGCOMM community, there is strong research interest in collaborative systems and the analysis of the structure and properties of online communities, fixed and mobile. There are applications for kids, business, entertainment, work(flow), systems that provide context, mobility, support for demography, criminology, and research into pure knowledge about human societies and use of resources.

The goal of the 2nd WOSN is to facilitate cross-disciplinary discussion of relevance to communications systems, involving novel ideas and applications, and experimental results. The workshop solicits original, previously unpublished ideas on completed work, position papers, and/or work-in-progress papers. We encourage papers that propose new research directions or could generate lively debate at the workshop.

WOSN will bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss the challenges and important questions posed by online social applications. Of particular interest are problems related to network and system architecture design that can best support emerging and future social and collaborative systems, and how those social networks can shape the design of existing distributed systems and real networks.
Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

* Internet Scale Measurement and analysis of online communities
* Correlation of different types of social networks
* API/application toolkit software architectures and system design
* Mobile social nets
* Privacy in Online Social Networks
* Experiences with deployed artifacts (e.g., FB applications)
* Economic models for OSN
* Social gaming applications
* Implications of social networking on network and distributed systems design
* System design for social networks
* Network architecture design to support large scale social applications
* Search strategies in social networks
* Rating, review, reputation, filtering, expertise, interest and trust
* Identification of communities and their evolution in time
* Social media analysis: blogs and friendship networks
* Mobile social networks
* Information sharing and forwarding
* Anonymity and privacy and usability (of tools to manage)
* Decentralized (ad hoc) network applications and services
* Challenges posed by social networks

Submission Instructions

Submissions must be no greater than 6 pages in length and must be a pdf file. Reviews will be single-blind: authors name and affiliation should be included in the submission. Submissions must follow the formatting guidelines at http://www.sigcomm.org/sigcomm2009/.

Authors of accepted papers are expected to present their papers at the workshop. Submissions must be original work not under review at any other workshop, conference, or journal.
Important dates
Submissions due Friday March 6, 2009
Notification of acceptance Friday April 10, 2009
Camera ready version due Monday May 4, 2009
Workshop date TBD
Program Committee
WOSN Steering committee Thomas Karagiannis Microsoft Research, Cambridge
Peter Key Microsoft Research, Cambridge
Balachander Krishnamurthy AT&T Labs--Research
Milan Vojnovic Microsoft Research, Cambridge
PC Co-chairs Jon Crowcroft University of Cambridge
Balachander Krishnamurthy AT&T Labs--Research
PC Members Ian Brown University of Oxford
Chen-Nee Chuah UC Davis
Graham Cormode AT&T Labs--Research
Jon Crowcroft University of Cambridge
Claudia Diaz Leuven, Belgium
Robin Dunbar University of Oxford
Paul Francis Cornell
Krishna Gummadi MPI-SWS
Tristan Henderson University of St Andrews
Thomas Karagiannis Microsoft Research, Cambridge
David Kempe USC
Balachander Krishnamurthy AT&T Labs--Research
Pablo Rodriguez Telefonica
Stefan Saroiu Microsoft Research, Redmond
Craig Wills WPI