Building virtual communities on top of online social networks

Current day social networks have amassed large amounts of information on how people interact, consume data and disseminate ideas. Virtual organizations, on the other hand, have crafted frameworks and models to use such data in distributed, heterogeneous environments. In this paper, we discuss the benefits of using social network technologies in support of virtual organizations. To emphasize which types of virtual organizations can benefit most from a social network based approach, we give a classification of social network relationships. Building on the work of sociologists, we focus on the cases when organization memberships can increase the benefits for members while also helping the organization to advance its cause. As a proof of concept application for our proposed solution, we created an application running on the popular social network Facebook.