Harnessing the Cloud for Mobile Social Networking Applications

The cloud computing model inherently enables information from social networking services (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so forth), context-based systems (location, activity, interests, etc.) and personal applications (call logs, contacts, email, calendar, and so forth) to be harnessed for multiple purposes. This article presents an agent-based system architecture for semantic and semi-automated applications that utilize the cloud to enrich and simplify communication services, for instance by displaying presence information, prioritizing information, and dynamically managing groups of users. The proposed architecture is based on the concept of aggregated social graphs, which are created from harnessed information about how people communicate. This article also presents challenges in achieving the envisioned architecture and introduces early prototyping results.