Mobile social networking: reconnect virtual community with physical space

Online social networks (OSNs) such as Facebook and MySpace, etc., greatly improve our social connectivity and collaboration. However, those applications lead to a shift from physical communities to virtual communities. The recent availability of mobile broadband connections and location technologies, their increasing affordability, and the usability of new mobile devices (e.g. smartphones) have led to the emergence of mobile social networks (MSNs), which re-connect the virtual community to the physical region, and move users between them in a way that enhances both. Currently, MSN applications are mushrooming and racing to replicate the success of social computing in the mobile domain. We argue that the potential success of MSNs lies in active collaboration among users, which naturally arises many interdisciplinary challenges. However, there exists no systematical survey about MSNs. This paper thoroughly characterizes the basic design principles, research architecture, typical techniques, and fundamental issues in MSNs from cross-discipline and application viewpoints. Our contributions lie in the following aspects: First, we summarized the basic design principles and fundamental issues that run through MSN researches and applications; then, from multidisciplinary viewpoint, the research architecture is divided into multi-dimensional structural characteristics and evolution of users’ rational behaviors. Finally, from application perspective, MSNs are categorized into two areas: Socially inspired mobile networking technologies, and enhanced real social life with mobile computing (people-centric tasks and place centric tasks). Briefly, this paper organizes the isolated topics and systems in existing work into meaningful categories, and structures the design space for identifying social-technical challenges, inspiring potentially interesting social networking applications, and suggesting important research opportunities.