Ubiquitous Social Networking: Concept and Evaluation

Despite the great success of online social networks, there is still no automated way to facilitate communication between people in the physical environment. Ubiquitous social networking services target at transferring online social networking benefits to the physical world, by facilitating advantageous relationships during physical meetings between people who do not know each other, but probably they should. In this paper, we present a potential solution for establishing ubiquitous social networking services by integrating online social networks with opportunistic networks. This solution, called local social networks, focuses on uncovering relevant connections between people nearby, by providing a platform for automatic exchange of user personal information in order to discover interpersonal affinities. Firstly, we define and discuss the concept, advantages, preliminary architecture and potential future applications of local social networks as well as introduce the first prototype, named Spiderweb. Afterwards, we present results of a qualitative investigation that researched whether 16 active online social networks users would accept ubiquitous social networking services. The results revealed that all the participants perceived the usefulness of these services and 14 of them would be willing to accept all the necessary requirements for the establishment of local social networks and consequently be potential users.