A Social Identity Approach to Identify Familiar Strangers in a Social Network

The authors present a novel problem of searching for 'familiar strangers' in a social network. Familiar strangers are individuals who are not directly connected but exhibit some similarity. The power-law nature of social networks determines that majority of individuals are directly connected with a small number of fellow individuals, and similar individuals can be largely unknown to each other. Moreover, the individuals of a social network have only a local view of the network, which makes the problem of aggregating these familiar strangers a challenge.