Patent ID: 8671141

Claim:
A method comprising: obtaining, via at least one computing device, a social graph representing a plurality of social network users as a plurality of content consumers and content producers of the social network, each content producer producing, and each content consumer consuming, one or more items of content, the social graph identifying a content sharing relationship for a consumer-producer pair comprising a content consumer and content producer of the plurality of content consumers and content producers, the content sharing relationship representing that the content consumer consumes the one or more content items produced by the content producer; selecting, via the at least one computing device from the plurality of content consumers and content producers, a content sharing hub for at least one consumer producer pair, the content sharing hub having a content sharing relationship with each of the content consumer and the content producer of the consumer-producer pair; and defining, via the at least one computing device, a new content sharing relationship for the consumer-producer pair using the content sharing hub, the new content sharing relationship representing that the content consumer consumes the one or more content items produced by the content producer via the content sharing hub; wherein there are a plurality of consumer-producer pairs for the plurality of content consumers and content producers, selecting a new content sharing relationship for the consumer-producer pair further comprising: determining a plurality of subgraphs of the social graph, each subgraph having as its content sharing hub one of the plurality of content consumers and content producers and comprising one or more consumer-producer pairs of the plurality of consumer-producer pairs and a consumer and producer for each of the one or more consumer-producer pairs; determining a cost for each subgraph; and repeatedly selecting one of the plurality of subgraphs based on the cost determined for each subgraph until it is determined that each consumer-producer pair of the plurality of consumer-producer pairs is covered by a content sharing hub of a selected subgraph of the plurality of subgraphs, wherein a selected subgraph has the content sharing hub that is used to define the new content sharing relationship.