A Wide-Open World of Social Networking

Monica Lam MobiSocial Computing Laboratory Stanford University

MobiSocial is supported by AVG, Google, ING Direct, Nokia, Sony Ericsson. Part of the NSF Programmable Open Mobile Internet (POMI) 2020 project.

Goals of This Class

�  Early results in research in social networking architectures

�  University computer science research �  Demos of ongoing research

�  Android market: DungBeetle �  Stanford Wifi

�  ID = eday � Password = stanford

Motivation

�  Who owns the data on Facebook?

�  How many Facebooks do we need?

Who Owns the Data on Facebook?

�  You

�  Facebook

“You grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook”.

Personalized Search

+

Changing Privacy Policies

Companies Come and Go ...

How Many Facebooks?

A monopoly exists

when a specific enterprise has sufficient control over a particular service

to determine the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it.

Examples of Terms

Monopolies

When not legally coerced to do otherwise,

monopolies typically produce fewer goods & sell them at higher prices

than under perfect competition

to maximize their profit

at the expense of consumer satisfaction.

Multiple Social Intranets?

Social Internet

�  No single owner of users’ data or app platform

�  No need to join the same network

Focus:

Social Internet for Personal Interactions

Application Platform

Idea 1: Mr. Privacy

Social application platform

�  Use our email identities

�  Data stored by the mail provider of our choice

A Social App on Email

Social Browsing

http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/socialbar/ [M. Fischer, T. J. Purtell, M. S. Lam, mobisocial.stanford.edu 2010]

Email Messages

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Mr. Privacy Applications

�  Users do not need to sign up �  Interact with anybody with an email address

(university and corporate)

� As private as email

�  Looks nothing like Email � Social apps: glorified mail clients

�  Leverage email’s identity, protocol, database

�  Instantly usable by > 1 billion people

Idea 2: DungBeetle

Your heart-to-heart conversations are yours.

Phone-to-phone communication.

Demo: DungBeetle

�  Please download from Android Market DungBeetle

�  Create a new group on the fly using NFC or GPS locations

�  Real-time feed

�  Social applications � wePaint

� weTube

Today’s App Platform

Global Social Graph

Challenge

Peer-to-peer (phone-to-phone) applications

Can we make them as easy to write as centralized applications e.g. Facebook app?

Phones Can’t Write to Each Other!

Talk Through a Messaging Service

Messaging Service

How to keep the messaging service in the dark?

Cryptography.

NFC: Near Field Communication

~800 kbit/s

Trusted Sharing of Public Key (NFC)

Ian’s Secret Key (s)

Ian’s Public Key (p)

1024 bits

Messaging Service

Send Secret Message Ian’s

Secret Key (s) Ian’s

Public Key (p)

p, 00101011010…

Encrypt p

00101011010…

“I Am ���Bored!”

“I Am ���Bored!”

Decrypt with s

p

Today’s App Platform

Global Social Graph

DungBeetle P2P Platform

Encrypted Messaging Service

My ���Backup

Ian’s ���Backup

Application Platform

�  Access to friends

�  Group management

�  Multi-party applications

�  App communicates to friends

�  App keeps info about users

-- while protecting users from spam, etc.

-- without a central server!

Demos

�  NFC-Based micro-interactions

Demos: Micro-interactions with NFC

Summary

Issues �  Data ownership and Monopoly

Social Internet �  No need to join a proprietary network

Mr. Privacy: email based platform �  SocialBar: social browsing

DungBeetle: P2P mobile social platform �  wePaint �  weTube

Technology exposure: NFC, cryptography

Getting Involved

�  Tell your friends

�  Join the beta user community

�  Help develop apps

�  Help develop the infrastructure

Applications on http://mobisocial.stanford.edu

�  SocialBar

�  DungBeetle (Android Market)