E-SmallTalker: A Distributed Mobile System for Social Networking in Physical Proximity

Small talk is an important social lubricant that helps people, especially strangers, initiate conversations and make friends with each other in physical proximity. However, due to difficulties in quickly identifying significant topics of common interest, real-world small talk tends to be superficial...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in2010 IEEE 30th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems pp. 468 - 477
Main Authors Zhimin Yang, Boying Zhang, Jiangpeng Dai, Champion, Adam C, Dong Xuan, Du Li
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.06.2010
Subjects
Bluetooth Service Discovery Protocol
Computer science
Distributed computing
ESmallTalker
Iterative Bloomfilter
Lubricants
Milling machines
Mobile communication
Mobile computing
Mobile handsets
Mobile System
Protocols
Social network services
Social Networking
Web server
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Small talk is an important social lubricant that helps people, especially strangers, initiate conversations and make friends with each other in physical proximity. However, due to difficulties in quickly identifying significant topics of common interest, real-world small talk tends to be superficial. The mass popularity of mobile phones can help improve the effectiveness of small talk. In this paper, we present E-SmallTalker, a distributed mobile communications system that facilitates social networking in physical proximity. It automatically discovers and suggests topics such as common interests for more significant conversations. We build on Bluetooth Service Discovery Protocol (SDP) to exchange potential topics by customizing service attributes to publish non-service-related information without establishing a connection. We propose a novel iterative Bloom filter (IBF) protocol that encodes topics to fit in SDP attributes and achieves a low false positive rate. We have implemented the system in Java ME for ease of deployment. Our experiments on real-world phones show that it is efficient enough at the system level to facilitate social interactions among strangers in physical proximity. To the best of our knowledge, E-SmallTalker is the first distributed mobile system to achieve the same purpose.
ISBN:142447261X
9781424472611
ISSN:1063-6927
DOI:10.1109/ICDCS.2010.56