I-Corps: Dynamic Social Networks: From Research to Marketplace

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Dynamic social networks have the potential to revolutionize the way social networks are used. Event/context-based social networks can be used to not only connect with friends to share content such as pictures and videos for fun, but can also be used in commercial settings such as enterprise, education, training, agriculture, and healthcare. In dynamic social networks, peers belonging to an event can be people attending a conference, students in a classroom, employees of a company, farmers in different parts of the world. However, today's plethora of social networks mostly have a flat structure centered around the user. This hinders many users from posting content of certain events/activities to such social networks as the content may be accessible by many irrelevant peers. For example, in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, content posted is shared with all the users' connections. Even if a facility to organize friends into groups is available, it is highly static and cumbersome. In group-based social network such as Google Circles, a user can add another user to his/her circles without the consent of the latter, thereby compromising privacy and content security. Services such as Whatsapp have an over-simplified interface with content being pushed to users in a group, even if the user is not interested in it. In file-sharing/collaboration services such as Dropbox or Google Drive, all members of a "shared folder" have control over others' content if they are allowed to contribute. They can delete or modify others' content, thus compromising content security. Also these services do not have a user-friendly interface. Hence, there is a strong commercial impact for cloud-based dynamic social networks such as eCloud.This team developed cloud-based service architecture where users can communicate and collaborate using their devices, similar to human interaction. Their research explores two architectures: (a) User devices act as thin clients, using the broadband access networks to access the data residing in the cloud, and (b) Decentralized architecture where devices collaborate with each other within the local area (access) networks while in proximity. As an extension of this research activity, they have developed a prototype dynamic social network application called e-Cloud and made it available for public use. The proposed innovation improves content visibility, facilitates content isolation, and enables users to search for relevant content efficiently. With event/context-based social networks, users can share content in the relevant social network in the cloud and make it available for people interested in the content. By streamlining content sharing with the help of context, dynamic social networks prevent overwhelming users with irrelevant content.