What is a Social Network?
For those of you not already familiar with social networks, a social network, in the simplest sense, is a means of keeping track of a set of people (each of whom have a "profile" in the social network) and the relationships (usually involving friendship) between them. For example, let's consider a simple social network that contains four people's profiles: Alice, Bob, and Cathy, and Don. Say now that Alice is friends with both Bob and Don (in which case, we consider Bob and Don to automatically be friends of Alice, reciprocally). And Cathy is also a friend of Don. Graphically, we could draw this network as:
Here, each profile in the network is represented by a circle containing the name of the profile (more formally, such circles would be called "nodes") and a friendship relationship between two people (which, for our purposes, is always reciprocal) is shown as a line connecting two profiles of people who are considered friends.
The Assignment
For this assignment, you will create an application that keeps tracks of the information in such a simple social network. More specifically, your application will allow for user profiles to be added to, deleted from, or looked-up in the social network. Moreover, for each profile, you will keep track of the person's name associated with that profile, an optional image that the person may wish to display with his/her profile, an optional "current status" for the profile (which is basically just a String indicating what ac- tivity the owner of that profile is currently engaged in), and a list of friends for each profile.