Mobile Social Networks

In the EU funded Social Nets project
http://www.social-nets.eu/
we are working with network science and social science
researchers to understand the relationship between human's
real and virtual social networks. The goal is to use the
measurement (and understanding of context) of human contacts
to drive the design of online social network systems that
better reflect the reality of true relationships. Thus the
formation of new relationships, the ageing and forgetting of
old, and the creation of default trust/privacy/access
privilege classes for others can all be driven by the
actual encounters between people. An added benefit is that
secure key distribution can be carried out during encounters
(via users' smart phones), potentially providing much
stronger confidentiality, even from a centralized OSN
provider.

Alternatively a completely decentralized social network cloud
can be built on mobile devices themselves, without recourse
to the infrastructure of the cloud at all.