EXISTING SOLUTIONS AND DISCUSSION
Mobile Social Application —
A large number of interesting and useful mobile social applications have been proposed. Social Serendipity [10] is a mobile-phone-based system that combines widely used mobile phones with the functionality of online introduction systems to cue informal face-to-face interactions between nearby users who do not know each other but probably should. Serendipity uses Bluetooth to sense nearby people and utilizes a centralized server to decide whether two users should be introduced to each other. The system calculates a similarity score by extracting the commonalities between two proximate users’ profiles and behavioral data, and sums them according to user-defined weights. If the score is higher than the threshold set by both users, the system will inform them that someone nearby might be interested in them. For instance, internal collaboration in large companies can be facilitated by Serendipity for introducing people who are working on similar projects. It is emphasized that privacy issues are important and fundamental in Serendipity, and privacy-protecting tools should be designed carefully.