Social Networking

Applications
Title	Social Networking
Author(s)	Rui Barradas Pereira.
Level	Basic
Year of Publication	2011

Social Networking as become a part of our daily life and millions of user use social network to interact with its social and professional contacts. The concept of posting information about "what are you doing" very rapidly progressed to post "where are you".

Location enabled Social Networking allows you to post your current location or to check into places or venues. This allows the user's friends to know where the user is and the user can know what other user are at the same location where he is.

Application Architecture

Social Network applications depend normally on an architecture that includes a user mobile device and an information server accessible through the internet.

The user mobile device is usually a mobile phone with internet access, localization capabilities and a multimedia interface running the social networking application.

There are two modes of operation for these applications:

• The application periodically sends automatically the user position to a server. The user's location is available to its friends in the social network.
• The user posts its position by posting its coordinates or by checking in nearby locations or venues. The user location is available to its friends and the list of other users present at the location is available to the user.

Variants to these modes are:

• Some location based social networks are directed specifically to dating and the user defines a set compatibility parameters and the server return compatible dates that are in the vicinity of the user.
• Some of these applications allow users to chat with other users in the proximity.
• In some networks all users are visible to all other users but in most there are privacy options that determine who can view the user location.
• Some of the applications integrate with Twitter or Facebook by posting the user location in these social networks.

These applications are considered non-critical applications.

The precision required by these applications is low, being the current accuracy provided by civilian GPS is enough.

Privacy Issues

All social networking applications and sites have privacy issues since users sometimes choose to share information that can be used for purposes different of those intended. In the case of location based social network this can be even more critical since the information about the user location can be shared to all its friends, to all the users of the application and sometimes is made public to everyone in the internet.

The information about the user location can be used by others to know where the user home is an whether he is at home or at certain locations. This information can be used to commit crimes such as robberies on the users or for stalking the user.

When using these services the user should take into consideration the level of privacy that the service provides and who will have access to the user location. These security concerns lead to the appearance of sites such as Please Rob Me that inteads to raise awareness about revealing too much information.

Application Examples

Example of location-based social networks:

• foursquare: Allows to check in on location, share information about the location and to know where your friends are.
• Gowalla: Allows to check in on location, share information about the location and to know where your friends are.
• Facebook: Facebook Places provides check in functionality in Facebook.
• Google Latitude: Google service that allows the user to share its location with selected users.
• Twitter: The Twitter API allows to add latitude and longitude information to every twit.