Harnessing the Cloud for Mobile Social Networking Applications

Background

Tim-Berners Lee already in 1995 defined the Web as a platform of collective intelligence. The viral growth of social networks today can be explained through both societal developments and technological advancements that together have enabled new types of applications where users today co-create content. ‘The cloud’ is the current paradigm of computing, building on this notion of co-creating both content and services (Lytras et al., 2008). Thus, Lee’s vision of a collective intelligence is becoming true. This is in particular true for social networking applications, as users feed the services with personal information and also contribute to the development of services.

The decentralized design techniques where end users participates in creating content provides a basic model for designing social networking applications. Creating, sharing, tagging and commenting on content while building social networks (communities) are therefore central, as social needs are one reason for the viral growth of these services. However, mobile devices are now taking this even further by enabling users to be ‘always on’ which has many implications.