Supporting social interaction in campus-scale environments by embracing mobile social networking

With the popularity of smart phones, the warm embrace of social networking services, and the perfection of wireless communication, mobile social networking has become a hot research topic. The characteristics of mobile devices and requirements of services in social environments pose challenges to the construction of a social platform. In this chapter, the authors elaborate a flexible system architecture based on the service-oriented specification to support social interaction in a university campus. For the client side, they designed a mobile middleware to collect social contexts such as proximity, acceleration, and cell phone logs, etc. The server backend aggregates such contexts, analyzes social connections among users, and provides social services to facilitate social interaction. A prototype of mobile social networking system is deployed on campus, and several applications are implemented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture. Experiments were carried out to evaluate the performance (in terms of response time and energy consumption) of our system. A user study was also conducted to investigate user acceptance of our prototype. The experimental results show that the proposed architecture provides real-time response to users. Furthermore, the user study demonstrates that the applications are useful to enhance social interaction in campus environments.