PROJECT PROPOSAL - CS 8803 (AIA)
M-SHARE – SOCIAL NETWORKING ON MOBILE DEVICES
GROUP MEMBERS:
HARESH AVHAD
NEHA DEODHAR
ANKUR PAI
NEHA SHEVADE
MOTIVATION AND OBJECTIVES
With the increasing popularity of the internet, Social Networks have become one of the most
upcoming areas in the interactive computing field. Social Networking websites allow people with
common interests to connect with one another, build online profiles, chat and share photos, videos
and music. Sites such as Facebook and MySpace have gained widespread popularity in recent years.
They provide an exciting way for people to make new friends as well as keep in touch with older
friends.
Another technology that has become widely popular is mobile technology. Mobile phones began to
proliferate in the 1990s and allow people to remain in touch wherever they are. Today, practically
every person has a mobile phone. Advances in this field allow users to send messages to one
another, share photos and videos (using Bluetooth technology), connect to the internet and a variety
of other features.
Combination of these two technologies would certainly be extremely beneficial and as expected,
“mobile social networking” is hyped to be the next big thing. Mobile social networks enable
individuals with common interests to converse and connect with one another using mobile phones.
This allows users to remain in touch with each other and get the latest updates without actually
logging into the social networking websites.
Currently, mobile social networking tools provide users with short text messages when new
comments or friend requests are posted to their profiles. It would be great to take this idea further
and allow individuals to exchange information which includes text messages, photos, videos, music
etc. using mobile phones. For example, it will be nice if we could set up an impromptu meeting with
a group of friends or forward some photo that has been taken on the cell phone immediately to
people who might be interested in it.
We propose building a “mobile info sharing application” that would enable users to share messages,
photos, music and videos. At present, this sharing is possible using Bluetooth technology. However,
this requires users to be present close to one another. Our application will let users connect and
instantaneously exchange information with each other regardless of where they are and without
requiring them to log into their social networking profiles.
RELATED WORK
In a web based social network, one or more individuals of similar interests or commonalities,
converse and connect with one another. A few years back, the idea of social networks was extended
to mobile phones. This provides all the features of web-based social networks on an individual’s
cellular phone. Under the Cingular deal subscribers get short text messages when new comments or
friend requests get posted to their MySpace profile. Also, special phones called Helio phones include
applications that make it easy for customers to view friends' profiles and post comments and photos
onto MySpace. This was the first step of adding social networks to mobile applications.
Using this as a baseline, another cellular company called Rave Wireless came up with a mobile social
networking application that allows students to connect to their teachers, faculty, fellow students and
even the campus security. Faculty and teachers can notify students about changes in assignments or
schedule for the class. Students can also conduct online chats with their professors. Also, in case of
emergency, security alerts can be provided to all the students. Students can also collaborate with
each other by sharing files with one another.
Currently, there are various applications which allow their users to upload photos and videos from
their mobile phones to some photo sharing application on the web. Examples of these are ShoZu,
Treemo, Yahoo! Go Flickr etc. Each of these applications allow their users to upload their photos
and videos to photo sharing applications like Picasa, SnapFish, Treemo etc. Pickle is another photo
sharing mobile application which allows users to load their photos to a central spot and then
distribute the photos to all the people subscribed to Pickle.
PROPOSED WORK
Social Networking Services (SNS) are increasing in popularity day by day. They encourage users to
communicate with previously unknown network members on an unprecedented scale. With the
advent of technologically sound mobile phones, social networking through mobile phones is the
requirement of the highly advanced and rapidly moving technological world.
We are proposing to develop a mobile device based application that enables lightweight, groupcentric real-time communication as well as photo and video sharing.
The core concept of our project is that, a group of people can exchange messages, photos and
videos. The information from the sender will be sent to a server, from which it will be propagated to
the users subscribed to that particular group. One point to note is that the users can be members of
multiple groups. The architecture used for the project would be Client-Server architecture.
The main features of our project are outlined as follows:
 Ability to send messages, photos and videos to a group
 Public and Private groups: The groups can be public as well as private. Public group means that
you can search for groups of interest by keyword and join them. Here, the administrator
needs to provide permission for a user to join the group. Private group means that you must
receive an invitation from a group moderator/member to see the group and join it
 Users will have the facility of viewing messages per group
 Senders will be able to filter out members from a particular group before sending data
 Receivers will also be able to filter out members from whom they don’t want to receive data
 There will be an upper bound on the size limit allowed to send data
 We also need to conform to a standard format for different file types in each category viz.
messages, photos, videos
 If for some reason there is not enough space available on the server/client i.e. the
server/client is overloaded, then we need to maintain a buffer to store the data temporarily
and repeatedly send data until success or for a maximum number of attempts
 There will be facility to create a new group. The group creator can choose members who can
join the group
 Users can change their user names whenever they wish to
 Users can also quit a particular group
We plan to implement all the above mentioned functionalities. Many successful attempts have been
made to implement social networking on mobile devices as stated in the related work section but
integrating all the stated features with cellular phones and keeping into mind the social networking
aspect of it, the proposed project is certainly a novel idea and an extension to an existing technology.
Architectural Design
SERVER
Sharing
N/W
Sharing
N/W
D
Sharing
N/W
C
B
A
(Receiving Clients)
(Sending
Client)
C
B
(Receiving Clients)
(Message sent to only selected
few of the entire group)
(Entire Group receiving
the message)
PLAN OF ACTION
We plan to use the following technologies.
Software:
 Google Android
 Java
 Eclipse 3.2
Platform:
Microsoft Windows
Schedule:
Week
Feb 18 – Feb 24
Feb 25 – March 9
March 10 – March 23
March 24 – April 6
April 7 – April 13
Proposed Work
Introduction to Android
Development of client side functionalities for information exchange
Development of server functionalities
Implementation of Additional Features such as filtering etc.
Documentation
EVALUATION AND TESTING
The project will be tested and evaluated on the following factors:
 Scalability
The amount of requests that the server can handle at a time, without loss of information provided
by any of its clients will be measured. This will depend on the amount of memory available at the
server in order to handle large number of requests. Evaluation will also be done on how the server
addresses the problem when there isn’t enough memory on the cell phone of the receiving client to
receive the sent items.
 Time and Space Evaluation
The amount of time required to send the photo or video files from the sending client to the
receiving client will be evaluated. This will depend on the size of the file that is being sent and also
on the server load. The average time will be calculated and efforts will be made to improve this
value. Also the maximum size of the file which can be sent by the client will be evaluated. A tradeoff
will be made between the time required to send a file and the maximum size of the file to achieve
better performance.
We plan to evaluate our project using testing methods such as unit testing, stress testing etc.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
[1] Information on mobile social networking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_social_network
[2] Google Android, http://code.google.com/android/
[3] Pickle – a photo sharing application, www.pickle.com
[4] MySpace Mobile, http://www.myspace.com/attmyspacemobile
[5] Rave Wireless – A campus mobility application, http://www.ravewireless.com/
[6] Albrecht Schmidt, Paul Holleis, Jonna Häkkilä, Enrico Rukzio, Richard Atterer, “Mobile Phones
as Tool to Increase Communication and Location Awareness of Users”, ACM International
Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 270, Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Mobile technology,
applications & systems