Similar to the adoption of the Internet during the '90s', consumer demand is
influencing companies to adopt mobile as a new channel for communications,
marketing, service delivery and payment. Internet adoption started with
companies providing basic information, which quickly evolved into service
delivery, marketing and e-commerce. The same phenomenon and adoption curve
is unfolding in the mobile world today, as consumers are demanding
information and media whenever and wherever they need it. As a result,
companies are looking for new ways to satisfy this increasingly mobile
consumer base.
Moreover, the arrival of Web 2.0 has led to radical changes as regards not
only technical specifications of the net, but in the ways both software
developers and end-users use the Web. The next step is now to have Web 2.0
technology implemented on mobile platforms, since it will lead to a further
development of them, and will make group communication systems accessible
for almost everyone and everywhere, opening at the same time the door for a
huge new upcoming market.
This thesis focuses on the idea of extending social relationships created in
the Web to portable devices, thus making it able for the people to
communicate and interact with each other regardless of where they are. These
tasks can be carried out by platforms that give support and services to
mobile devices through the net. They will also allow people to meet and
share experience in new ways, even though they are not always easy to use,
especially not with mobile terminals that have limited capabilities. In this
aspect, it is important to minimize set up time, since it is always the
bottleneck of a communication process. Regarding that, one communication
technology which a lot of research is being done in nowadays is NFC (Near
Field Communication). It has limited range, but on the other hand its set up
time is much faster than other existent technologies, such as Bluetooth.
Since NFC enables quick connection establishment it could be a suitable
technology to be applied in Social Network building and extending purposes.
As a proof of concept, a mobile Social Network platform has been developed
with the purpose of providing Social-Network-related services to cell phone
common users, such as profiles and users management, storage of
relationships between users, privileges and privacy control, multimedia
sharing services, etc. In addition of using NFC for building social
networks, the platform also takes advantage of third-party APIs offered by
external social networks to access them.
As for Near Field Communication technology, it has been used in the service
maybe where it suited the most, provided its fast connection capabilities,
that is friends adding. Finally a solid, modular, and easily extensible
prototype has been ...
