WhozThat? evolving an ecosystem for context-aware mobile social networks

Abstract

he mobile social networking revolution is upon us and could have as profound an effect in enriching local social interaction as the Internet has had in enriching online information access and discourse. The key observation in this article is that the explosive phenomenon of online social networks can be harnessed using mobile devices to answer the compelling question that frequently appears in local social contexts: "Who's that?" It is often the case that people want to find out more about those who are around them; for example, who is that speaking to a group of people in a corner of the room, or who is that who just walked into the room? Standard solutions include asking those around you, looking at name tags, introducing yourself, and so on, none of which leverage the power of technology to help answer these compelling questions and thereby enrich the social interaction.Online social networks have exploded in popularity [1-3]. As of December 2007, Facebook had over 59 million users [4]. It is estimated that over 85 percent of four-year college students have a Facebook profile, presenting a very usable penetration rate and providing an incredible resource for applications that might leverage this data. These online social networks provide a wealth of personal contextual information, including name, picture, contact information, gender, relationship status/interests, activities/hobbies, musical preferences, literature interests, group membership, and, of course, friendship information concerning user interconnection. Social networks provide a variety of mechanisms for users to share these rich sets of contextual data with other users, including searching for other users with similar interests, as well as a means to establish and maintain communication with other users. Social networks can be seen as a natural evolution of the Internet, where the first big wave facilitated a person's access to information; for example, Web servers and peer-topeer networks providing news and information content, as well as ways to buy products, whereas this next big wave is focused on facilitating person-to-person communication.WhozThat is motivated by the idea that bringing this rich contextual information from online social networks into the real world of local human interactions substantially enriches local social interaction. Imagine if you knew more about the people around you in a social gathering, such that you could more easily strike up a conversation with someone with whom you were interested in talking. By being informed via mobile technology of the identity of the person with whom you are seeking to interact and consulting information obtained from that person's public social networking profile, you could more easily initiate a conversation, perhaps introducing yourself and saying, "I noticed we have a shared interest in this hobby or that cause." The ability of mobile social networking (MoSoNet) technology to substantially lower the barriers to social discourse by minimizing unfamiliarity could revolutionize human soc...

Mobile Data Offloading through Opportunistic Communications and Social Participation

“…In a bazaar, these queries are further disseminated through peer-to-peer communications, to find the possible answers. WhozThat [7] is a system that combines online social networks and mobile smartphones to build a local wireless networking infrastructure. It utilizes wireless connections to online social networks to bind social networking IDs with location.…”

Mobile Social Network Sites as innovative pedagogical tools: factors and mechanism affecting students’ continuance intention on use

“…Mobile devices and wireless technology facilitate the use of SNSs in a ubiquitous way, to this extend, they are Mobile Social Network Sites (MSNSs). MSNSs can substantially lower the barriers to social discourse by minimizing unfamiliarity, which could revolutionize human social interaction (Beach et al 2008). With advantages of accessing at anytime and anywhere, MSNSs are employed as innovative pedagogical tools in e-learning, which brings "anywhere and anytime learning" or even "context-aware learning" to learners, called ubiquitous learning (u-learning) (Hwang et al 2008;Ogata et al 2011).…”

Advancing the state of mobile cloud computing

“…For example, some applications have begun to combine together mobile location with social networks to generate multimedia content, e.g. a song playlist or a recommended video [4], that is tailored to the individual or individuals who are nearby an audio jukebox or video screen that is aware of their presence. Such contextual mobile applications would be composed as shown in Figure 4.…”