BUZZ-ING SPACE
A Social Network for Georgia Tech
Madhav Deshpande , Purna Mehta , Shilpa Pal ,Akshay Phadke, Kinjal Shah,
1. Motivation and Objectives:
We propose to develop a Social Networking Application for Georgia Tech. This application will support
formation of ‘virtual communities’ of users sharing similar interests. These users will be provided with
functionality to use these virtual communities in order to query for and share resources relevant to the
community. Likewise, this application aims at grouping together the ‘contacts’ present in a user’s profile
based on different categories, in order to form the virtual communities. We propose to take this social
network to mobile phones.
Our primary motivation for this project has been two factors – viz. the growing demand for ‘cool’ mobile
applications; and the great success of social networking web sites like Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, etc.
The concept of porting social networks to Mobile Phones is highly innovative and exciting. There have
only been a few recent systems in this domain, like Aka-aki, MeetMoi, etc. These have their limitations
like Bluetooth coverage restriction, too much messaging, etc.
Coupled with the novelty of the application is the fact that GoogleTM has launched their Android Open
Handset Alliance API in the recent past. Android is an open framework for mobile application
development in Java, which exposes much of the device functionality in a simplified and unified manner
to the mobile developer. In addition, the Android Open Handset Alliance API consists of packages for
playing media, querying the location and displaying advanced graphics too. Mobile development till
today was restricted to using platform-specific C++ SDKs for the Symbian platform, or using J2ME.
However, the GoogleTM Android framework purportedly eases the work for an application programmer,
by abstracting out the device details and exposing a uniform functional API. This is a major driving factor
behind the selection of the Android API for development.
Our objectives include:
• Development of a basic Social Networking Application for Georgia Tech, containing profile
information of the users. This information shall include preferences, likes and dislikes, as well as
home location information.
• Formation of virtual communities based on user preferences. These will be formed as virtual
contact lists on the users’ mobile phone. They will be visible to the user as contact lists,
however, the user does not have to manually create them.
• Development of a content-sharing application overlaying the social network. This will contain
functionality for providing updates to a specific virtual community, sharing calendars, requesting
information about a topic, etc.
• Development of a mobile photo-tagging application, which shall geo-tag photos clicked using
the Android Mobile Phones. These photos will be used in a Photo-Sharing application overlaying
the social network. Automated geo-tagging shall faciliatate location based searches.
• Some fun application like a social game
2. Related Work:
This project is mainly based on Google Android platform. [3] provides an insight on the code of this
platform and will be really helpful to build our social network. [4] presents a study of social network
presenting its advantages and disadvantages whereas [1] and [2] gives an insight on area of mobile
social networks. The comparative study of these papers will help in building a strong architecture for our
social network. This helps in deciding the characteristics and features of our mobile social network. The
references [7], [8] and [9] are practical examples of social networks. The applications of these social
networks range from forming communities to resource sharing to game playing. These references
present the practical advantages and disadvantages of social networks and their applications. This will
be really helpful for deciding on features of various applications for our social network. The previous
work done till now, as shown in [5] and [6], focuses on tagging and displaying the results based on
tagging. They do not take into account the likes of the user nor do they recommend users to view
images pertaining to their preferences. Also the search is basic and does not take into account the
relationship present between the actual entities in the picture. Games on mobile social networks like [7]
allow users to play games on their mobile devices via SMS or using the Web and provide facilities for
points gathering and prizes as part of the community. The limitations of such systems are that they do
not support multiplayer gaming. One can play games on their mobile devices through either SMS or
Web but does not provide any functionality wherein users can play with their friends.
3. Proposed Work:
The main idea is of this project is to develop a social network of friends form the contact section of your
mobile using Google Android platform. The basic architecture of the project is as follows:
It is very common concept to form contact groups on mobile phones pertaining to users needs like,
business contacts, school friends and so on. But these groups are mere classification of contacts done
manually by user. Instead of this if classification is done on basis o the profiles of contacts then this
process becomes visibly easier and also more useful. The idea is form a social network wherein the
profiles of each contact will be stored. These profiles will contain information ranging from passions,
favorite sports, favorite music and so on. This information will be stored in the form of a database on
server wherein data can be accessed. To maintain privacy, the user has to be legal member of the
social network. Also the user should have access rights to view others profiles. This social network can
be used for various purposes as listed below:
3.1) Virtual Communities
The concept of communities is very common in social networks like Orkut, Facebook and so on. The
communities are formed based on type of interests and anybody is free to join it. The disadvantages in
these types of communities are:
• Although one can choose a community, one cannot choose the co-members in this community.
• One has to send messages to all the community members. Selective messaging cannot be done.
• Similarly, one receives messages from all members, which is sometimes spam.
The formation of virtual communities eliminates these disadvantages. Here, based on common interests
listen in profiles accessed form database, one can selectively form community with one’s friends. Also,
this community will be selectively used only by the one who is forming the community. When a new
virtual community is formed, the co-members are given the option of choosing to join the community.
Also since this virtual community is formed by the user among his friends, there will be no unknown
member in the community. This eliminates the disadvantages of spamming and also helps in selective
message posting. These virtual communities can be used for posting messages and discussions on
interesting topics, blogging, update on events and so on. For example, suppose a virtual community is
formed by a user based on his interest in Thai food then user can inform the interested friends about
upcoming Thai food festival.
With the help of Google Android platform, we plan to host social networks which are common online,
on mobile networks. Also this will help to form social networks based on contacts available on mobile,
thus preventing unwanted users and securing information.
3.2) Resource Pooling
Another use for virtual communities can be resource pooling for common events. An example for this is
that if a user plans to go from one place to another within a time frame, and one of his contacts is
planning to do the same, then for facilitating car pooling, we intend to provide the user a choice to use
car pooling.
3.3) Geo-Tagging of Photos on the social network:
This is a new and an innovative idea because the previous work on geo-tagging was based on using the
computer to access the photos rather the mobile phone. Current social networking sites do not allow for
this feature and we feel that this feature can go a long way in improving the social networking sites.
Android provides the feature to take photos, videos through the devices. Android also comes with the
location based services which allows users to get geographic information from the Global Positioning
System (GPS). So we are going to add this geographic information to the photos as tags. These photos
can be uploaded along with tags to our server. The advantage and the usage scenario is that, if a person
who is touring a certain place wants some photos of the place and nearby places, he can obtain those
using his phone. This can guide him in various ways including finding out the places in the vicinity of a
region. Also he can upload his own photos of that place which can be placed on the community and
viewed by others. Since the photos are shared they are easily accessible to the authorized and
authenticated users.
On top of this we are going to add an search which will be better than that in Flickr. For example, if the
user searches Georgia Tech in Flickr, he gets images of tags Georgia tech. We plan to extend this by
adding a extra feature which display the Klaus Building or The Student Center as well. We will try to his
derive relationships between the two locations.
Also we are planning to recommend images to users based on his likes. For example if user has a trend
to view images pertaining to mountains, we can suggest him more images related to his liking. If time
permits we will also interface it with the Flick API which will increase the amount of pictures available to
the user.
4. Plan of Action:
4.1) Resources:
Software Requirements:
Apache Server - Available at apache.org
Android SDK - This is available on the android development website at code.google.com/android
Android Emulators
Eclipse IDE - not mandatory but preferred for developing android applications. Available at
eclipse.org
Hardware Requirements:
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A PC which will act as a server with minimum configuration as follows:
• Processor Speed: 1.8 Ghz Dual Core
• Memory: 1 GB RAM
Our laptop satisfies the above requirements. Hence we are going to use one of the laptops as a server.
4.2) Schedule:
Week
1
2
Dates
February 11 – 15
February 18 – 22
3
February 25 – 29
4
5
March 3 – 7
March 10 – 14
Work Proposed
Project Proposal
Read up Developer Reference Documentation on GoogleTM
Android API. Install the framework, the Eclipse IDE Plugin, and
get started with a basic Java application. Test it using the
Simulator
Design mock-ups of the User-Interface of the Social Networking
application
Implement the functionality of the Social Networking
Application. Create the code for user interaction.
6
7
March 17 – 21
March 24 – 28
8
9
10
March 31 – April 4
April 7 – 11
April 14 onwards
Implement the functionality for extracting information from
user profiles and formation of Virtual Communities. Create UI
for Virtual Information sharing and messaging.
Add functionality for content-sharing
Project Wrap-up and Write-up of the Report
Project Workshop presentation
4. Plan for evaluation
Testing:
The testing needs to be performed at the various levels of application:
Social networking: It can be tested with few signed up users (say 10). These users can be asked to
create/update profile, send messages to each other and theses actions can then be verified to check if
these results are correctly reflected.
Geo-Tagging: A user may click a picture/ take a video at a particular location. This data is automatically
being tagged with the geographic location information and is available at the server. If another user
queries for the same location, this data should be returned to him.
Gaming: The game can be tested on the parameters such as real time occurrence of every move, how
well the game scores are updated in the system of the players, etc.
The server will be tested for load carrying capacity, performance as the number of users increase, effect
of increasing image storage and caching mechanism.
6. Bibliography:
1. http://www.elasticspace.com/2004/06/mobile-social-software
Existing Social softwares for mobile phones.
2. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/11/the-holy-grail-for-mobile-social-networks/
Information about existing mobile social networking applications
3. http://code.google.com/android/documentation.html
GoogleTM Android Documentation
4. L. Backstorm, D. Huttenlocher, J. Kleinberg, X. Lan“Group Formation in Large Social Networks:
Membership, Growth and Evaluation”KDD – 2006
5. Torniai , Carlo, Steve Battle, and Steve Cayzer. "The Big Picture: Exploring Cities through
Georeferenced Images and RDF Shared Metadata". Chi Conference, 2007
6. Torniai , Carlo, Steve Battle, and Steve Cayzer. "Sharing, Discovering and Browsing Geotagged
Pictures on the Web." hpl.hp.com, May 2007.
7. http://www.frengo.com/
8. http://www.orkut.com/
9. http://www.facebook.com/