SocioNet: A Context-Aware Approach for Lowering the Communication Barrier

Social networking platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, foster new social interactions. Following this vision, we introduce SocioNet, a context-aware and rule-based system for mobile devices that finds best matching persons in proximity and therefore establishes contacts. The system architecture is a hybrid central server and P2P architecture supporting matchmaking. As concerns for social platforms arise mainly in terms of usability and privacy, SocioNet proposes (i) the use of existing personal information for matchmaking to avoid tedious filling-in of user profiles and (ii) preservation of privacy by not storing personal data on the SocioNet server if not wanted by the user. We demonstrate the feasibility of SocioNet by a prototypical implementation based on .NET CF and WLAN. To rate user satisfaction, we performed a user survey. First results show, that privacy is still a major cause not to use social networking platforms when physical presence is involved.