Business reputation of social networks of web services

This paper introduces a set of criteria that are used to establish the reputation of a social network from a business perspective. This network is populated with social Web services. Compared to regular Web services, social Web services establish and maintain networks of contacts, count on their (privileged) contacts when needed, etc. These criteria are membershipCost, demandLevel, satisfactionLevel, and retentionLevel, and assist a social Web service in selecting the best social network in which it will sign up. Similar criteria have been defined in the past with emphasis on the security perspective of a social network. A set of simulations conducted over an in-house built Java testbed, are also presented in the paper with focus on analyzing three aspects: profit of network, quality of network, and profit versus quality of network.