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
ž Early results in research
in social networking architectures
ž University computer science research
ž Demos of ongoing research
ž Android market: DungBeetle
ž Stanford Wifi
ž ID = eday
ž Password = stanford

Motivation
ž Who owns the data on Facebook?
ž How many Facebooks do we need?

Who Owns the Data on Facebook?
ž You
ž 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
ž No single owner
of users’ data or app platform
ž No need to join the same network

Focus:
Social Internet for
Personal Interactions
Application Platform

Idea 1: Mr. Privacy
Social application platform
ž Use our email identities
ž 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
--------------14061063155814361411115211210721210
Content-Type: application/json; charset="us-ascii”
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
eyJ1cmwiOiJodHRwOi8vYmV0YS5uZXdzLnlhaG9vLmNvbS9ibG9ncy91cHNob3QvbWNkb25hbG
QtaGFwcHktbWVhbC1yZXNpc3RzLWRlY29tcG9zaXRpb24tc2l4LW1vbnRocy5odG1sIiwidGl0
bGUiOiJNY0RvbmFsZOKAmXMgSGFwcHkgTWVhbCByZXNpc3RzIGRlY29tcG9zaXRpb24gZm9yIH
NpeCBtb250aHMgfCBUaGUgVXBzaG90IC0gWWFob28hIE5ld3MiLCJjb21tZW50IjoiYXQgbGVh
c3QgeW91IHdvbid0IGdldCBzaWNrIGZyb20gcm90dGVuIGZvb2QgYXQgTWNELiIsImNvbnRlbn
QtdHlwZSI6InRleHQvaHRtbCIsImlkIjoiMUYxREUzREMtMjE0NS00NUExLThGMUYtODJCMkE4
RjY3MjExIn0=

Mr. Privacy Applications
ž Users do not need to sign up
ž Interact with anybody with an email address
(university and corporate)
ž As private as email
ž Looks nothing like Email
ž Social apps: glorified mail clients
ž Leverage email’s identity, protocol, database
ž Instantly usable by > 1 billion people

Idea 2: DungBeetle
Your heart-to-heart conversations are yours.
Phone-to-phone communication.

Demo: DungBeetle
ž Please download from Android Market
DungBeetle
ž Create a new group on the fly
using NFC or GPS locations
ž Real-time feed
ž Social applications
ž wePaint
ž 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) 1024 bits
Ian’s
Public Key (p)

Send Secret Message
Ian’s Ian’s
Public Key (p) Secret Key (s)
Encrypt “I Am