Examples of real-world social networks

Real-world networks are often more complicated than the examples we’ve considered. Let’s consider some nuances in social media networks. In the simplest forms, a social network contains mutual connections between friends at a single point in time. However, some friends may interact more often on the social media platform than others; they may comment on posts, reshare content, and message each other frequently. Weighted networks assign numerical values to edges in a network according to some measurement of relationship strength or frequency of interactions.

Let’s return to our hackathon network and weight our edges based on the average number of conversations per day of the hackathon between different team members. Perhaps Machiko is coordinating the business use case of the technology and does not interact much with Ayanda, the backend engineer, but needs to make sure the front end is intuitive (Greta’s team position...