Mobile social networking receives lots of attention, but it is currently limited to basic services only. Most of the applications are "one-dimensional", providing only microblogging, presence, location-based messaging or knowledge routing/delivery and mainly rely on manual intervention by the user, not using the phone's powerful sensing capabilities.

Social Proximity Networks team focuses on new generation of services that mobilize social networking in novel ways, including physical proximity as the starting point of most social relations and interactions. The implementation will provide users a holistic view about their social networks, simpler and more efficient ways to manage and grow them, and easy ways to plug-in third party and user-generated services.

Research topics

• What is the best role a mobile phone can play in bridging physical ad-hoc communities and virtual social networks?
• What services can we build for a fused social environment?
• How to build on mobile user's existing social networks?
• How to fully utilize the power of mobile devices beyond combining sharing and communication?
• How to translate, navigate and fuse physical proximity and social proximity?
• What are the incentives of user adoption/retention? What are the valid business models?

Publications

Guang Yang, Zhigang Liu, Karim Seada, Hawk-Yin Pang, August Joki, Jun Yang, Daniela Rosner, Manish Anand and Péter Pál Boda, "Social Proximity Networks on Cruise Ships", to appear in Mobile Interaction with the Real World Workshop at MobileHCI 2008, Amsterdam, Netherlands, September 2008

Collaborators

• MetroSence at Dartmouth College
• Urban Sensing at CENS/UCLA
• Kimiko Ryokai at UC Berkeley
• Eszter Hargittai at Northwestern University

Contact

Péter Pál Boda, Team Leader

Team Members