In a YouTube
video, two
Stanford graduate students stand together in front of a television. One draws
with his finger on his smartphone, then holds it next to the second student’s
phone. The drawing zips from one phone to the next. The first student then
touches his phone to a television remote control and the image soon appears on
a nearby TV. Then the second student begins to draw. His flourishes are
duplicated pixel-for-pixel in real time on both the TV and the first phone.
This is the
world of MobiSocial—a glimpse into the future of mobile-social computing.
A team of
computer scientists, graduate students, technology experts, and industry
representatives from AVG, Google, Nokia, and Sony Ericsson gathered recently to
officially kick off the Stanford Mobile and Social Computing Laboratory. Or,
for those tweeting at home: MobiSocial.
They have
formed MobiSocial to ask the most fundamental
questions about this rapidly burgeoning field, questions that seem obvious now
that mobile and social media are firmly entrenched, but which weren’t so
obvious as the technologies were entrenching themselves: Can social be done
better? Can it be even more social and more fun? Can it be more open? Can it be
more secure? And, if so, how?
In short, MobiSocial is about imagining and creating an open-source
mobile-social media future.
Ecstasy and agony
“Facebook, Flickr, Twitter are all fantastic ideas and transformative uses
of technology,” said Monica Lam, professor of computer science at Stanford’s
School of Engineering and faculty director of MobiSocial. “But
people have rushed into proprietary playgrounds seemingly unconcerned about the
consequences, ranging from limited innovation to privacy.”
Like the Web
before and, later, mobile phones, the shift to social media happened rapidly,
before anyone could fully understand what such mass adoption might portend.
Meanwhile, popular culture is swept up in a technology wave in which just a
handful of social networking portals have come to dominate.
MobiSocial is working to create a new class of mobile and social computing
technology that works in consumers’ interests while enabling all the positive
aspects of social media—from e-commerce to closely knit social circles.
Partyware
Michael Fischer, a doctoral student in computer science and MobiSocial member
working on a social sharing app known as Mr. Privacy, sees things in terms of
consumer options. “The real promise of MobiSocial is innovation. Closed
networks limit creativity and, ultimately, the user’s choices. We’re trying to
take things to a new, broader level none of us can imagine today,” he
said.
MobiSocial’s
Junction platform makes it easy to create apps to swap links and photos, to
collaboratively create notes and drawings, and to play games with anyone we
meet, all without wires and at the click of a button. The technology is built
on near-field communication (NFC), but the folks at MobiSocial have dubbed it
something much more fun: partyware.
Imagine attending a party where anyone can share music to a mutual jukebox and
then vote on the playlist—call it the first crowd-sourced DJ. Other apps might
allow the sharing of videos on a big-screen TV. All these social activities
transpire between the devices and their owners with no proprietary middleman,
without big brother watching over.
A new landscape
So, what might the mobile-social landscape look like down the road? The members
of MobiSocial already have produced a suite of applications that provide a hint
of a new direction. It includes the features we’ve come to expect—such as
anywhere-anytime communications with networks of friends, efficient e-commerce,
easy access to information—while promoting innovation and competition, personal
data security and, of course, privacy.
There is the
aforementioned Mr. Privacy, an open-source rethinking of social networking. If
social networking has proved anything, it is that people love to share
articles, music, video, and photos with their friends. But that freedom comes
with a certain price: The service provider often owns the content posted to its
servers. It may be searched, analyzed, and used by advertisers.
Mr. Privacy
accomplishes some of the same objectives—providing a platform for social
applications such as allowing the sharing of links and comments among friends—but
it does so using a more private technology based on email.
“Mr.
Privacy’s use of email is key,” said Lam. “It is the most widely
adopted social communication technology and it’s an open standard—meaning you
can share information, links, and conversations with friends outside of
proprietary networks.”
For T.J. Purtell, another computer science PhD candidate in the MobiSocial
group, the big win with using email as a social sharing service is data
ownership: “Email providers guarantee that a human will not look at your
email and that the contents of your mail will not be shared with third parties.
With deeper integration of social media in our lives, control of this data will
become increasingly important.”
Novel applications
MobiSocial also has produced a Facebook app called SocialFlow that allows users
to organize and manage their many social subgroups, to help overcome the hurdle
of group creation and encourage private sharing.
“No one
has just one monolithic social network,” said Diana MacLean, a doctoral
student working on an app called SocialFlow. “We have work colleagues,
family, college friends, high school friends and so forth. Sometimes you want
everyone to see something, sometimes you don’t. SocialFlow helps narrow and
define our social subgroups,” MacLean said.
SocialFlow works by looking at the images in which a person was tagged
recently and from analyzing their Gmail email traffic. The app then suggests subgroups,
which the user can further refine to better manage social interactions.
The personal cloud
Other apps gather, manage and protect the ether of personal data that surrounds
us. This ether—known as the “personal cloud”—will follow us wherever
we go and will be sharable with whomever we choose.
“We’ll be
able to use this data to make purchases, to swap contact information, to share
photos and video. It will be very powerful,” said Lam. “The team at
MobiSocial is working today to ensure that tomorrow the personal cloud is white
and puffy with a shiny silver lining.”
The work of the Mobile
and Social Computing Laboratory is part of the National Science Foundation’s
Programmable Open Mobile Internet 2020 Expedition, which works to remove
barriers to innovation through creation of open standards and systems.
